killing her two companions. She moves from the scene of the tragedy to Utah, where she finds herself stalked by a mysterious figure – ‘the Man’, played by the film’s director Herk Harvey – and a cast of undead dancers at the abandoned Saltair bathing pavilion that looms out of the Great Salt Lake’s fluctuating dried-out flatness, a landscape not unlike the Fens. The film’s eerie discordant organ music has a similarly hypnotic effect on Mary as the hurdy-gurdy of Lost Hearts does on Stephen. And, indeed, as both soundtracks seem to have on me.
‘It was though – as though for a time I didn’t exist. No place in the world,’ Mary says, after a fugue-like episode where she cannot hear external sounds or interact with her fellow townsfolk, before the song of a bird brings her back into the now. The young drowned organist, cast in the role of an awkward outsider, has been allowed to live out a brief window of her lost youth: events not actualised that should never have come to pass. Her limbo is a fleeting foretaste of what could have been.
Like my family’s own future among these formless fields.
Fear and paranoia were staples of growing up during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Made in 1973, the year I was born, Lonely Water is a public information film I vividly remember seeing at the cinema as a boy, before whatever main feature I’d been brought to see.‡ In recent years it has acquired a deserved cult reputation for its dark, warning content. Watching it now you’d think there was little danger that any child who saw Lonely Water would set foot on a riverbank or the shoreline of a reservoir ever again. Yet I did still go fishing with only a friend for company, and we often did end up messing about near the water, which makes we wonder whether the film’s message was lost on their target audience. Perhaps the known risk added an illicit thrill we found impossible to resist?
Just a minute and a half long, the film opens with a panning shot across a black, twig-strewn pond, accompanied by Donald Pleasance’s chilling voiceover – ‘I am The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, ready to trap the show-off, the unwary, the fool’ – before the camera lingers on a hooded Grim Reaper standing in the shallows. We cut to another hooded figure, a blue-coated boy, who is playing with his friends on the muddy bank of a gravel pit. One of his companions, a lank-haired urchin, is poking a stick at a football that’s fallen into the water. We look up at them from the position of the ball, towards the down-jabbing twig and the four shouting children; the Spirit looms behind them, unbeknown, as the boy slips on the bank. Without learning the fate of the show-off (though the implication is obvious), we switch to a bucolic scene – a tranquil duck-filled millpond. This time a lone older lad is leaning forwards, supporting his weight on the bough of an overhanging tree, again to stab at some untouchable object. Donald Pleasance’s narrator informs us with great delight: ‘This branch is weak. Rotten. It’ll never take his weight.’ We hear the snap as it falls, the cloaked voyeur observing the unfolding tragedy through the nearby reeds.
The final scene jumps to a close-up of a ‘Danger No Swimming’ sign, spelled out in large red letters. ‘Only a fool would ignore this … But there’s one born every minute.’ A pile of clothes and a pair of shoes have been left among a mountain of detritus as the camera pans to the pit where a boy is struggling and shouting for help. ‘Under the water there are traps: old cars, bedsteads, weeds, hidden depths. It’s the perfect place. For an accident.’
Watching Lonely Water again, the grisly relish Donald Pleasance’s Spirit takes in his description of these lurking dangers is one of the most unnerving elements about it – this brief voiceover role might well be the most frightening of his long career. The lad, fortuitously, is rescued from the water by two sensible passing children who chide him in thick cockney accents – ‘Oi mate, that’s a stupid place to swim’ – and the Spirit is exorcised, leaving just a discarded robe on the muddy ground that is thrown into the water by his rescuers. But Pleasance is determined to have the last word, the Spirit’s voice reverberating as the camera lingers on the cape that is by now sinking beneath the brown waves:
‘I’ll be back. Back. Back …’
In works of unsettling fiction, Britain’s inland waterways are not commonly a haunted geographical feature, though we have a vengeful spirit born of water in M. R. James’s Dartmoor-set ‘Martin Close’, and a canal trip looms large in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s ‘Three Miles Up’. There is also a story that I cannot seem to shake by an unfairly neglected author of the second half of the twentieth century: A. L. Barker’s ‘Submerged’.
Audrey Lilian Barker was born in Beckenham, Kent, in 1918, and died in a nursing home in Surrey in 2002. She wrote eleven novels and numerous collections of stories (which include several supernatural tales); her novel John Brown’s Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1970, and her debut collection of short works, Innocents, won the inaugural Somerset Maugham Award in 1947. ‘Submerged’ is part of that collection and a powerful piece. It opens with a vivid description of a rural English river and its pastoral surrounds – of the purple loosestrife, yellow ragwort and red campion that cover its banks. Yet in this mild, sun-dappled scene we are soon reminded of the menace that lurks beneath the water’s gentle eddies.
He wasn’t supposed to swim in the river anyway, there was some talk about its being dangerous because of the submerged roots of trees. Peter knew all about those, they added the essential risk which made the river perfect.
In the striking mid-century artwork of the first edition’s cover, the story’s adolescent protagonist is depicted as a stylised green figure part-way through a plunging dive. As the boy Peter engages in his lone swims he delights in exploring the tangled willow roots and branches that form his new benthic world; as readers we delight too, initially at least, as Barker paints an intoxicating picture of wild swimming that would make Roger Deakin proud. Having discovered a sort of tree-formed underwater tunnel, Peter has the realisation that he must explore its hidden folds, an epiphany made concrete by the sudden ethereal apparition beside him of a fleeting kingfisher, ‘a flicker of cobalt, bronze and scarlet’.
I too remember my first proper view of a kingfisher, a squat-tailed sprite on the railing beneath the dilapidated railway bridge at the back of my aunt’s house. It was Christmas Day 1987 and Dad and I had gone for a walk to try out my new big joint birthday and Christmas present – a telescope, so that now on trips with my brother I would have my own optics to look through at all those distant waders and wildfowl. The kingfisher perched below us for two, perhaps three, seconds before propelling itself like a tightly wound clockwork toy down the right-hand bank of the Vernatt’s Drain, the uniformly straight channel that ran all the way to my grandparents’ former home.§ Finally the bird came into focus, on a wooden jetty that protruded through the reeds, the middle of its back illuminated electric-blue through my scope despite the dullness of the day. I was elated. Even my father, who though mildly interested in wildlife was no wide-eyed naturalist, knew we’d been honoured with a glimpse of the fantastic.
After Peter witnesses his kingfisher in the story, he dives back down to his tunnel, conquering its dark secrets, before coming to rest on the water’s sunlit surface in an afternoon reverie. This heady state is ruined by the appearance of a stranger: ‘It was a woman in a red mackintosh. No longer very young, and so plump that the mackintosh sleeves stretched over her arms like the skin of scarlet saveloys.’ The woman orders the half-concealed boy out of the water, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of her presumed partner, an oafish brute who, she tells Peter, wants to murder her. ‘He won’t lay a finger on me if there’s a witness and a chance he’d swing for it …’ Peter emerges reluctantly, remaining close to the thick cover of the bank’s vegetation. The man arrives and the pair argue, but the expected violence does not come. The boy’s sacred bathing place has, none the less, been sullied by their presence, its rhythms punctured by the intrusion of this odd, aggressive couple, with their air of illicit adult sexuality.
As the woman leaves, she steps on a weak spot on the bank and