Edward Parnell

Ghostland


Скачать книгу

James may well not have found the focus of Gordon’s novel on the emotional interaction of these characters – and the deliberate psychological ambiguity of the uncanny events – to his taste. In ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’ he pointed out what he saw as one of the cardinal errors ruining some modern examples of the genre: ‘They drag in sex too, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it.’§§

      Given that The House on the Brink was published in 1970 and aimed at teenagers there isn’t any sex involved, just a few stolen kisses. But there is a tenderness between the young lovers unlike anything we see in James’s stories. The novel reminds me more of the work of Alan Garner and, in particular, The Owl Service, which has similarly snappy dialogue and a clever, working-class teenage protagonist feeling his way towards a different life. (Indeed, on its release Garner wrote warmly of Gordon’s first book.)

      The teenagers and Mrs Knowles, encouraged by a local wise woman who possesses a feeling for such things (and an ability to divine water that’s shared by Dick and Helen), come to believe that this figure-like fragment of wood is the guardian of King John’s treasure, and has crawled out of the ooze of the marshes to protect its master’s hoard from Tom Miller’s over-curious pursuit. The wooden relic also seems to pre-empt the discovery in late 1998, just around the north-eastern corner of the Wash at Holme-next-the-Sea, of the so-called Seahenge, a Bronze Age circle of timber trunks uncovered beneath the transient sands by the vagaries of the tide.

      It’s a location that can’t stop itself from appearing in different stories and adaptations, and which, now I think about it, has acted throughout my own life as a strangely unblinking marker that stands on the brink of my vision.

      * Bewick’s ornithological masterpiece does include a lengthy description of the other ‘Wild Swan’ – the whooper swan – that we also came to see, but its eponymous smaller Siberian relative, the Bewick’s swan (Cygnus columbianus bewickii) was not described and named for the illustrator until 1830, two years after his death.

       Despite losing the toes of one foot and being bent virtually perpendicular by her condition, Nan was full of kindness and good humour. At Christmas she invariably got the role of quizmaster for family games of Trivial Pursuit, putting the questions to the rest of us with a Mrs Malaprop-esque disregard for pronunciation. ‘Who played Dr Strangle-glove?’ she asked. ‘Who wrote Don Quicks Oat?’

       I was born as Edward Heath was announcing the Three-Day Week. Towards the end of the decade – in 1977 or 1978, I think, during a power cut that was a precursor to the Winter of Discontent – I remember playing a Space 1999 card game by torchlight on the living-room floor with my mum and brother. Thrills didn’t only have to come from the supernatural; outer space and sci-fi also had its attractions.

      § The waterway was named after Philibert Vernatti, one of the Dutch ‘Adventurers’ behind the financing of the early seventeenth-century drainage of the Fens.

       Despite his outward respectability, Herbert Ingram MP had a reputation as a womaniser; there were allegations that he’d sexually assaulted the sister-in-law of his business partner. His ill-fated trip to America may in part have been a means to gain respite from his troubles back home.

      ** Aickman’s fellow founder Tom Rolt was another writer of the supernatural. L. T. C. Rolt is noted for his solitary collection Sleep No More (1948), a number of whose excellent stories use an industrial British setting of railways, mines and canals.

      †† In another coincidence the Hawaiian goose, a species that Scott’s Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust was instrumental in preventing from becoming extinct, shares its Hawaiian name – the Nene – with the river where Scott spent those formative years.

      ‡‡ Parts of the 1995 television version of Three Miles Up also happened to be filmed on the Great Ouse at Hemingford Grey.

      §§ James was in his late sixties when he wrote this. Taking into account the properness of his personality and the mores of the time, I think there’s every chance he intended the word ‘sex’ in this context to have a wider meaning encompassing romance and relationships, rather than referring to the physical act.

       WALKING IN THE WOOD

      Growing up surrounded by the sterile farmland of the Fens I was starved of trees, a feeling that made me appreciate their pathless pleasures all the more whenever the chance came.

      The woods enthralled me.