Bottom’ has familiar fairy-tale overtones of children led astray by malefic faeries or witches in the woods, or, more recently, balloon-carrying clowns; I’m almost surprised we weren’t read it at school alongside the disturbing never-go-with-strangers public information films we were shown. Its execution is chilling and bleak, despite being stripped of gruesome descriptions or over-elaborate explication – a characteristic of Northcote’s pared-down style. The detail that stays with me is the anguishing sound of Alice’s voice, which addresses her sibling and pastor father (his religious conviction seems of little use against these forces) as they realise that no brick house has stood in the wooded gully for decades, and that their sister and daughter will never be coming home:
Before Maggie could answer a voice was heard calling ‘Father! Maggie!’ The sound of the voice was thin and high and, paradoxically, it sounded both very near and yet as if it came from some infinite distance. The cry was thrice repeated and then silence fell.§
Amyas Northcote produced just a single collection of eerie stories – thirteen in all – in contrast to the fertile output of the man who imagined that other lone phantom-filled house in the woods. Today, Walter de la Mare is sometimes regarded, rather unfairly, as a writer who was old-fashioned even at the height of his interwar popularity. He was a contemporary of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot – both admirers of his poetry – but his work, unlike theirs, eschews the obvious trappings of modernism, instead focusing on atmosphere and the inexplicableness of life. In this sense, his poems and stories have a timeless quality, redolent with existential unease (which, it could be said, aligns them with the tenets of the new movement) – a quality also present in the best of Northcote’s handful of tales.
Photo (Walter de la Mare) Hulton Deutsch/Contributor via Getty Images
We must have read ‘The Listeners’ (the title poem of de la Mare’s second collection, published in 1912) at school, because I was already aware of it when it came a surprise third in the BBC’s 1995 Nation’s Favourite Poems survey – beaten by Kipling’s ‘If—’ and Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’. Later I was to learn it was a favourite of my great-aunt, who had grown up alongside my grandmother in the same cottage before emigrating to Australia as a ten-pound Pom in the early 1950s; the poem perhaps reminded her of the sleepy village’s ‘starred and leafy sky’, ‘of the forest’s ferny floor’, as she tried to reconcile Norfolk’s ever-distant memory from the opposite side of the world, and as she contended with the oppressive heat of Adelaide’s dry-hot summers, which most years left Leo’s thermometer-busting August of 1900 in the shade.
I think a lot about the separation of the two sisters: I never met my great-aunt, but I have come to be close to her sons – my dad’s younger cousins – on the opposite side of the globe, and their children, who are around my own age. From them I’ve learned that my great-aunt missed her native Norfolk and her sister (my grandmother) immensely – despite the possibilities her new life afforded her. The pair wrote to each other with metronomic regularity: I remember staying at Nan’s during the summer when the postman delivered the latest weekly missive from South Australia, sending her into a kind of reverie. Yet, even after a telephone finally arrived in Nan’s cottage at some point in the 1980s, the two sisters still never spoke, let alone considered the possibility of meeting up in the flesh and of my great-aunt returning as a visitor from down under.¶ If they had seen each other, or heard each other’s voices, I think the pain of that infinite distance would have been brought home and become a heart-breaking, unsolvable conundrum; certainly, it breaks mine now to think of it, bringing to mind Maggie and Alice’s forced displacement in ‘Brickett Bottom’.
In any case, my grandmother always had a sadness about her. Not only did she miss her sister terribly, her husband – my mysterious grandfather, an officer in the air force – abandoned her before the war’s end for another woman, leaving her to bring up three sons. She got on with things, supported by her mother and her younger brother, but her opportunities were limited and her circumstances – and perhaps her own pride – closed her off from experiences and happiness that, in a later generation, she could have had. Yet I am making these assumptions through the filter of so much dead time, more than seventy-five years after whatever took place between her and my grandfather – so what, really, do I know? The unfortunate Seaton, the protagonist of one of de la Mare’s finest and most-anthologised supernatural stories. ‘Seaton’s Aunt’, expresses this perfectly: ‘Why, after all, how much do we really understand of anything? We don’t even know our own histories, and not a tenth, not a tenth of the reasons.’
Walter de la Mare was born with the rather more prosaic surname Delamare in 1873, adding the Gallic twist when he started to pursue his poetry in earnest. His father, who worked at the Bank of England, died when Walter was four years old; one of six children raised by his mother, Walter could not afford a university education, so he took employment as a bookkeeper, aged seventeen, at the Anglo American Oil Company in London. He was to work there for the next eighteen years, marrying Elfie Ingpen – a name that could be straight out of one of his poems for the young – and raising four children of his own, before a life of office drudgery was cut short with, in 1908, a welcome award from the government of the sum of £200 (equivalent to around £23,000 today). By this point he had already brought out the poetry collection Songs of Childhood and the gothic novel Henry Brocken, both under the pseudonym Walter Ramal; the former was well received, but his first work of fiction sold only 250 copies. After his Civil List award, however (and the granting of an annual pension of £100 a year from 1915), he devoted himself full time to writing.
De la Mare died in 1956 and is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral. He was a prolific poet with almost fifty collections published during his lifetime – his posthumous Complete Poems stretches to nearly a thousand pages. His verses have a tendency towards the dreamlike and the gothic, full of powerful pastoral allusions to the natural world. But, as in his most famous work, ‘The Listeners’, the supernatural is never very far away, and it is this atmosphere of disquiet – of moonlit phantoms and mysterious promises – that has given the poem its popularity and longevity.
Never confining himself to poetry, de la Mare went on to write two further novels including The Return, which deals with supernatural possession, as well as critical works about Lewis Carroll and the dashing nearly-poet of the Great War, Rupert Brooke. De la Mare and Brooke had met in 1912 when they both contributed to an important anthology of ‘Georgian’ poetry (the grouping’s name referred to King George V, who came to the throne after Edward VII, in 1910). Following Brooke’s death on the Aegean island of Skyros – fittingly, perhaps, on St George’s Day 1915 – de la Mare was surprised to find himself named as a beneficiary in the younger man’s will, sharing future royalties with two other Georgians, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie.**
Walter de la Mare wrote a large body of short fiction, both for children and adults, among which are a sizeable number of exquisitely crafted and highly atmospheric stories of the uncanny. Interestingly, M. R. James was an acquaintance and fan of de la Mare, whose tales certainly do not suffer from the ‘blatancy’ of which the elder man disapproved. They are largely subtle works, their horrors elusive – illusive even: often, the reader is unsure if there are any actual horrors. In, for instance, ‘Missing’ – a tale of 1920s London (published in 1926) that captures the oppressiveness of the ensuing heatwave as vividly as L. P. Hartley does the scorched summer of The Go-Between – we are left little the wiser as to what the mysterious Bleet, up for the day from the country to escape the boiling temperatures, is bleating on about to the unwittingly accosted first-person narrator. There might have been a murder – there has, at least, been an inquiry into the disappearance of Miss Dutton, a lodger at the house of Bleet and his sister – but beyond that little is clear; De la Mare, it could be said, deliberately makes sure that much is ‘missing’. There are no obvious manifestations of the supernatural, but the story’s atmosphere is disconcerting, with the odious Bleet talking at the narrator as if he might as well not be there.
In ‘Crewe’, another