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Always the ghosts.
Reaching into the past concealed behind the glow-in-the-dark cardboard apparitions that decorated my childhood bedroom, the fascination was there from the start: on a family holiday to Wales, aged four, asking the tour guide in Caernarfon Castle whether we might see the place’s spectral lady; a few years later, obsessing over Borley Rectory – the ‘most haunted house in the world’ – which called out to me from my spine-creased Usborne Guide to the Supernatural World; or, at the Halloween party I begged my mother to let me have (long before such events were a commonplace British occurrence), dressing up as Dracula, my friends as the Wolfman and various grinning ghouls.
The writer M. R. James once wrote: ‘For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable. “Thirty years ago,” “Not long before the war,” are very proper openings.’
And if I think back through three decades of self-obfuscation, a host of recollections give confirmation.
With me, always the ghosts.
Yet even with hindsight no disquiet comes to me from these memories; they are reassuring, I can find shelter within them. Only later were we to become a phantom family – a host of lives lived, then unlived. The disquiet comes when I realise there’s no one left to help me reconcile the real and the half-remembered.
So, I must do it myself.
I must attempt to explore that sense so many before me have felt. The shadows they too have glimpsed among the fields, hills and trees of this haunted land.
To lay to rest the ghosts of my own sequestered past.
Chapter 1
It was, as far as I can ascertain, on Christmas Eve of the year 1994 that a young man drew up before the door of his childhood home, in the heart of Lincolnshire. He looked about him with the keenest curiosity during the short interval that elapsed between the fumbling of his keys and the opening of the front door. Inside, he began to study the four programmes available on his television set, pausing before a presentation that caught his eye. The time was five minutes before one o’clock, he realised. Christmas Day itself …
This, more or less, was how I first became acquainted with the work of M. R. James, my favourite – and arguably Britain’s finest – writer of ghost stories. I was home for the holidays during my third year at university and had been into town to celebrate the festivities. A little the worse for drink, I was alone in the living room, as my brother Chris – nearly six years my senior – was still out with friends. In the morning the two of us would open our presents together before spending the rest of the day at my aunt and uncle’s. In an attempt to compensate for the house’s emptiness and our parents’ absence, we’d started a tradition of labelling our gifts to each other as if from various half-remembered figures from our past: obscure family acquaintances, disliked former teachers, or people who we had given nicknames to – like Porkpie, the middle-aged man in the pork-pie hat who was a constant fixture in the pub we frequented, boring anyone who’d listen about the supermarket where he worked.
Not ready for sleep, I lay on the sofa and flicked through the TV channels. On BBC Two a grainy drama from the seventies was beginning. What I’d chanced upon was an episode of the classic ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ strand: Lawrence Gordon Clark’s adaptation of M. R. James’s supernatural tale ‘Lost Hearts’.
There’s a fearful symmetry to this, I’ve come to learn, because this particular film was first shown on BBC One a little before midnight on Christmas Day 1973, less than a fortnight after I was born. Had I already witnessed it before as a crying baby – perhaps my mother had happened at that very point to switch on the TV set to try and calm my tears? If she had, I doubt she would have found much respite, because the BBC version is a frightening piece of work; I was to find this out some twenty-one years later, when the ghost of a razor-nailed boy and his dark-eyed companion appeared on the screen in front of me.
Through the white gate at the back of the graveyard the ground changes abruptly, the approach from the rectory with its aged, ivy-clad trees replaced by a squat jumble of shrubs and sedge, punctuated by paths that run aimlessly to the water. The ‘lake’, as it is called, seems out of place in the west Suffolk countryside, reminding me of one of the shallow, ephemeral coastal lagoons you find in the Camargue. Lifeless trunks point upwards from its greyness like rigor-mortised fingers. The division between land and water is tenuous; there are no banks as such, just a dirty shoreline of mud over which the waves lap, adding to the feature’s temporary feel. This is not a giant puddle left behind by a flood, or some deliberately drowned world, but a spring-fed mere that has given its name to the neighbouring village.
Livermere Lake. ‘The lake where rushes grow’, from the Old English laefor-mere. I’ve known about this place for a long time too: since my brother saw a vagrant black-winged pratincole here in 1993, a rare hawk-like wading bird. I couldn’t join him to see it, which, as a keen birdwatcher, riled me for years (until I finally caught up with one myself on the Norfolk coast) and lent the location an enduring mystique in my head. Only later did I become aware of the connection between Great Livermere and M. R. James.
Montague Rhodes James – known to his close friends as Monty – was born in Goodnestone, a small Kent village midway between Canterbury and Deal where his father was then curate, in August 1862. After three years the family moved to Livermere, six miles from Bury St Edmunds, when Herbert James took up the rectorship of St Peter’s Church, whose gravestones I passed between on my way to the mere. This section is Broad Water, with the narrow tree-lined southern arm, Ampton Water, snaking off somewhere behind me, obscured by a screen of trees. The rain slants sparsely down as I scan the surface and shore: there are no rare waders today, though a typically noisy pair of black-and-white oystercatchers flies past, splitting the silence with their piping.
Across the water stands a second church, the now-ruined St Peter and St Paul of Little Livermere, derelict since the first half of the twentieth century. The tower, according to James in his 1930 work Suffolk and Norfolk: A Perambulation of the Two Counties with Notices of their History and their Ancient Buildings, was heightened so as to be seen from Livermere Hall, itself long gone, demolished as superfluous in 1923. Its owner, Jane Anne Broke, was a relative by marriage of Herbert James, which was how he came to be offered the role of attending to the spiritual needs of the village – a serendipitous move in terms of its influence on young Monty’s future ghost stories. Stately homes and their surrounding parkland appear in a number of those tales, reflecting James’s upbringing as the son of a well-connected rector and the privileged circles in which he was to circulate during his later career as provost of both Cambridge’s King’s College and Eton’s famous public school.*
In ‘Lost Hearts’, the young protagonist Stephen Elliott stands at his open window listening to the strange noises coming from across the mere: