I remember finding a badger skull on Butser Hill when I was seven or eight. I liked collecting bones and feathers and other bits of wild debris valued by children and stored them in a plastic box under my bed. The skull was shaped like a diamond with a hard crest along the top, and I remember clearing moss and soil from between the eye sockets. I was never bothered by skulls and bones, despite understanding they were dead things, but I was frightened of taxidermy. Perhaps it was because a skull is almost a new creature in itself, a thing of fascination, an anatomical artefact. Taxidermy looks so much like the living thing it once was, but without that glow that makes living things so beautiful. It reminds us how thin the veil is between life and death – something I avoid thinking about at all costs.
Around the same time that I found my badger skull, we visited Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor during a family holiday in Cornwall. It’s a haunting old shack, built in 1750 as a coaching house for changing horses and made famous by Daphne du Maurier’s classic novel about a group of murderous shipwreckers who drown sailors and loot their cargo. Du Maurier’s story was published in 1930 after she had been lost on the moors when out riding her horse. Swamped in fog, she sought refuge at the inn, where she was entertained by the local rector with tales of ghosts and smugglers. While many associate the name with the Caribbean sweet rum smuggled and stored at the inn, it actually came from the local Trelawney family of landowners, who served as governors of Jamaica in the eighteenth century.
It was nightfall when we arrived after a warm day on the north Cornish coast. By then it had grown grey with fog, and we drove through the moor in silence even our empty bellies couldn’t break. The roadside was speckled with lumps of granite, but the mist had closed off the rest of the landscape, the steep tors fading away into nothing. After a while we found the inn enclosed in a stone courtyard with a blue-and-gold macaw on a sign and an anchor slumped outside. I stepped out of the car and gazed down the road we had just emerged from. The sky was slate grey, the moon obscured by swathes of cloud that brought a humidity down on our shoulders. I remember tasting salt on the air, imagining gangs of smugglers hiding behind the rocks and waiting for a clear road to commit some dastardly crime. My cousin Calum and I had once raided the drinks cabinet at home when the adults were distracted, so I knew what rum tasted like – appalling – but I had heard it was a favourite tipple with smugglers on the go. Was there rum in Jamaica Inn? Were they preparing for a killing spree? Would I ever make it home to watch the latest episode of Noah’s Island? Dark thoughts for a dark night.
Inside the inn, we were told the story of a stranger who was passing through Bodmin Moor one misty night. He was standing at the bar, drinking a tankard of ale when he was called outside. He abandoned his drink and stepped out into the darkness. The next morning his corpse was discovered on the moor, but nobody knew how he had been killed or who had summoned him outside to his death. Today, the residents swore they could sometimes hear footsteps in the passageway to the bar, believed to be the dead man’s spirit returning to finish his ale. Visitors had also occasionally noticed a stranger sitting on the stone wall outside, who neither moved nor responded to their greetings.
Our evening passed without murders or lootings, but that didn’t distract me from what else lay within that fateful place. At that time, it was home to the Museum of Curious Taxidermy, a collection of whimsical tableaux by the Victorian amateur taxidermist Walter Potter. He was famous for his anthropomorphic scenes of stuffed animals mimicking human life, which were displayed at his museum in Bramber, Sussex during his lifetime. Titles like ‘The Kittens’ Wedding’ and ‘Guinea Pigs’ Cricket Match’ are easy to visualise, but he also created extraordinary pieces like ‘The Death and Burial of Cock Robin’, which included 98 different species of British birds and became the centrepiece of the collection. Google it, I dare you.
In 1984 the collection was bought by Jamaica Inn and attracted around 30,000 visitors a year, including my parents, sisters and me in the late 1990s. Being an amateur, Potter’s taxidermy was so contorted and anatomically incorrect that the results were fascinatingly horrible, and they have been etched on my mind ever since. When the collection was put up for auction in 2003, artist Damien Hirst wrote to the Guardian about Potter’s complete lack of knowledge on anatomy and musculature, claiming: ‘Some of the taxidermy is terrible – there’s a kingfisher that looks nothing like a kingfisher.’ He offered to buy the whole collection for £1 million, but his bid was rejected. Instead, the pieces sold for just £500,000 and the collection was dispersed.
We spent that night eating dinner in the inn, surrounded by tales of ghosts and smugglers and these macabre pieces of natural history. I remember yellow teeth emerging from shrunken jaws, stuffed rodents in miniature smocks and dresses, squirrels drinking from dust-smeared teacups that would live forever behind a glass display, cold and untouched by human hands. I had not been so glad to leave a place since visiting the Brading Waxworks museum on the Isle of Wight, although after seeing my distress, my dad suggested the animals had ‘probably’ died of natural causes. I believe him to this day.
Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn is one of many examples in literature where the night is used to shape the narrative. It isn’t a coincidence that the shipwreckers work under cover of darkness, although they need the night to lure in a lost ship with false lights.
In this story the night is an accomplice to the wreckers, shielding their crimes from the rest of the world and drawing the ships in to their perilous end. The night is so often associated with evil in literature: Dracula emerges at dusk to feed on the blood of young virgins, Othello strangles Desdemona in her bed, and Alec d’Urberville forces himself on Tess in the depths of a dark forest. But for Daphne du Maurier, the night is not only a force for darkness. At the end of her most famous novel, Rebecca, the unnamed protagonist drives with her husband towards Manderley, the house haunted by the presence of her husband’s first wife and the horrors of the past. As they draw closer, they realise something isn’t right – Manderley is ablaze in the night, burning to the ground under the blood-red light of sunrise.
In this story the night is a cleansing presence, burning away the relics of the past to clear a path for the characters to move forwards; a sign of freedom, of restoration. Most of du Maurier’s novels were carved into the Cornish landscape, a place that brought liberation into her own life. She once wrote that in Cornwall she found ‘the freedom I desired, long sought for, not yet known. Freedom to write, to walk, to wander. Freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone.’ We witness this freedom in the closing pages of Rebecca burning through the night like a cold cremation.
When I was studying for my A-levels at college, I spent my weekend working between the delicatessen counter in Waitrose and the tearoom at Uppark House in West Sussex. They were both excellent, food-orientated jobs and, having just left secondary school and given up compulsory PE, I inevitably grew chubbier. Despite this, I loved working with food and embraced every opportunity to try new things, to taste pungent cheeses from southern Italy or cut up sticky baklava on trays that never quite made it to the sample table.
Working at Uppark House was an enjoyable job for a 17-year-old, although I was less interested in the seventeenth-century architecture than in the fact I could have a laugh with the other girls, drinking lemonade and taking home bulging bags of leftover scones at the end of my shift. Mum was delighted by this and started getting annoyed if leftovers failed to appear. In the summer we would sell melting ice creams in the sun and trap wasps in jam jars to appease customers, which I now regret.
The house is a National Trust property, which means the hygiene standards are high and the bins are located 3,000km from the tearoom. A slight exaggeration, but for a teenager at the end of her shift, tired and dreaming of looted scones, the 10-minute wheelbarrow-walk to the bins was annoying. One night, late in the season when it was already dark by five o’clock, I wheeled my barrowful of bottles and teabags down the long
drive and round to the courtyard where the bins were kept. They were huge things with the sort of lids that seem designed not to be opened without considerable effort, and each night I divided up my barrow-load into general waste, clean cardboard, compost, and the satisfying crash of the glass bank.
That evening I deposited my goods and had just turned to start back when I stopped for a moment. Ahead of me, the road stretched on towards the gatehouse, but behind that the estate was thick with trees. Towering oaks had started scattering acorns for the jays to collect through the autumn, and earlier at the top of the conifers, I had seen goldcrests on the smallest branches, jigging about like hot popcorn. Summer was fading, and the air was filled with the welcome aroma of decay that swims out of forests on September evenings.
Above me, a tawny owl was calling. Tawnies are surprisingly small birds of prey, about the size of a healthy woodpigeon, their reddish-chestnut plumage flecked with cream. Somewhere in the canopy, I could hear the shaky hoo-ooo-oooo of a male, which I’ve always thought sounds like he’s trying to pick a fight with someone much bigger than he is. I put my wheelbarrow down and stood, listening to the owl offer his greetings to the night, and recalled one of my favourite poems by Wordsworth, in which a young child communicates with the owls at dusk:
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone,
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him. —And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call, —with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of jocund din!
Suddenly, hidden in the trees far in the distance, a second call cried out in the gloaming, like Wordsworth’s owls responding to the boy. A female, strong and sharp, was calling to the male, and he was responding in turn, sounding more assured than when he had been alone. The famous too-wit too-woo sound of the tawny owl is actually two owls communicating; the female utters a shrill too-wit in search of her lover, and the male answers back with a reassuring too-woo.
For a while I listened to the owls calling to each other, wondering if I was witnessing some magical avian romance unfolding or if it was more of a Did-you-have-a-good-day? conversation. As night closed in and spread through the grounds, any velvety fragments of blackbird song lingering in the trees faded away, and all was quiet except for the haunting calls of the owls. Except it wasn’t haunting. We weren’t in a ghost story, the owls and I, and the forest wasn’t a gruesome backdrop for some terrible tale. It was a rustling, moving world, hidden beneath the darkness but, like everything in nature, it was neither good nor evil. Out there in the trees, mice were eating roots, insects were climbing along rotten bark, a stoat was eating the remains of a rabbit, and everything was synchronised with the rhythms of nature. I was finishing work, and the owls were courting through the trees, all of us waiting for the day to close and the next stage of life to begin.
A few years after leaving Uppark, I discovered the writer H.G. Wells had also spent time there as a boy when his mother was Uppark’s housekeeper for 13 years. I studied Wells on my undergraduate degree, and his science-fiction works from the 1890s are among my favourite stories of all time. Sadly, I also read his novel Ann Veronica while writing my thesis on the politics of women’s suffrage in literature, and my loyalty to Wells was tested. A young woman casts off the shackles of social convention to pursue politics and equality, only to meet a man, fall pregnant and give it all up for motherhood. I later read the theory that this story was based on one of Wells’ own failed relationships, with the resolution providing the fantasy ending he so wanted in real life. Ah, men.
Despite his later failings, I’ve remained loyal to Wells simply for the raw storytelling power behind his earlier science-fiction. The Island of Dr Moreau is horrifying reading, and in true Frankenstein fashion, illustrates the immorality of the actions we perform, even today, in the name of science and progress. The Time Machine was thought to be inspired by Wells’ childhood spent at Uppark, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine the tunnel that leads from the main house to the kitchen – now the tearoom where I served scones and soup – as the perfect dwelling for Morlocks to skulk while the weak and ditsy Eloi scamper through the ancient relics above ground. But it was his 1897 tale The War of the Worlds that stayed with me most – the classic story of aliens invading suburban London, obliterating the fortress of the British Empire.
Of all the stories associated with the night sky, alien invasions have the broadest scope. We can tell ourselves anything we like about the horrors of planet earth, what hides in the forest or our own basement, but it is all enclosed within the known boundaries of our world. To look into space and imagine other universes is to imagine the infinite because there is an infinite amount that we don’t know. With stories like The War of the Worlds, we are twice as frightened because it casts humanity into oblivion, reducing our presence on our planet to dust. The suburbs of London – seemingly one of the most affluent, secure places on earth at the end of the nineteenth century – are invaded by aliens and the capital is almost destroyed. This ruin is a victory for every human and non-human being that has been destroyed at the hands of our own species, made even more satisfying by the narrator’s own early ignorance:
‘A shell in the pit,’ said I, ‘if the worst comes to the worst, will kill them all.’
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So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. ‘We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear.’
It isn’t the end of humanity that appeals to us in these stories, but the potential for change. Was there ever a force so arrogant as the human race? Even today, blessed with hindsight, history books, education, ethics and longevity, most of us are still under the illusion we are the rightful rulers of the planet, born to exploit other creatures, people and the environment to suit our own short-term ends. How satisfying to open our minds up to other possibilities by reading about aliens invading earth and putting us all back in our places. If the British Empire can disappear, if humanity can be swept away like breadcrumbs, how many other traditions and institutions can be reworked, renovated and changed for the better? Behind the horror of these stories lies hope; it’s the antithesis of the Daily Mail.
Aside from its compelling narrative, it was the aliens themselves that drew me into The War of the Worlds. The idea of other worlds, planets and communities away from earth is mesmerising, regardless of whether we will ever meet them ourselves. To stand outside, look up at the stars, and imagine another being doing precisely the same thing somewhere else is reassuring. The earth is a lonely place, vulnerable and tiny, and whenever death frightens me I remember the marine biologist and pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson who wrote in Silent Spring how we are all connected in nature. We are part of something greater than ourselves, a web of living creatures who live and die and whose atoms move on to be part of something new. The idea of other planets, unreachable but still existing out there somewhere, offers consolation amid the madness of life on earth.
Why are we afraid of the dark? Is it the darkness itself that frightens us or the fear of what it hides? Nyctophobia is the name given to that feeling of dread caused by darkness, originating from the reptilian side of our brains that creates anxiety when faced with rational fears like dangerous animals, heights and thunderstorms. For most of our time on earth darkness has meant danger, leaving us vulnerable and exposed, unable to detect threats nearby. Evolutionarily speaking it
was once an advantage to be scared of the dark, but in a world of lightbulbs and burglar alarms, this fear has become more of a nuisance than a benefit.
Unfortunately, fears are hardwired into the brain in three different ways and are difficult to remove. The first is by observing others as a child and learning their fears, which is why it’s best not to display a fear of spiders around children. Going by this logic, I’m not sure where my arachnophobia came from – my dad loved picking spiders up and letting them crawl on him, but although I’ve never wanted them dead I still don’t like house spiders. Little ones are fine, and I don’t mind daddy-long-legs, tarantulas, money spiders or even those jumpy things. But house spiders are the devil incarnate: brown, hairy, thick-legged monsters. We used to have a forest-green carpet in our old house, and on spidered evenings all you could see was a shadow flickering across the floor like the girl from The Ring.
The second way for fear to take hold is through a traumatic experience, like falling off a cliff or being attacked by a bear. The third is through a process called anchoring: you have an unexpected fright, and the brain anchors it in some random object nearby, like being attacked outside an arcade or experiencing trauma while watching a particular TV show. Some fears are common and easily understandable, like heights and sharks, while others might plant seeds in our minds that then cause us to enter fight-or-flight mode whenever we encounter that fear again.
Dark Skies Page 3