Edward Parnell

Ghostland


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its nearby Norfolk border – the same stretch of monotonous mud and water where the moribund King John may have lost his treasure some seven hundred years before – were the meadows and woods that encircled my grandmother’s house. Those fields and trees, which seemed so full of stories, shadows and secrets, scorched themselves into my memory and into the pages of my first novel.

      I loved to explore the woods in the company of Uncle Gordon and Great-Uncle Billy. The countryside was dense and wild, and formed part of a large estate. Both uncles worked on the local farm and lived with Nan in a tied cottage. There were crystalline streams forded by narrow planks we would cross on our hikes over the rippled landscape, watercress beds we would wade through in our wellies (‘waterboots’ to Uncle Billy), and numerous birds and other signs of wildlife all around. Bill, a kindly giant of a man who had barely left Norfolk apart from brief twice-yearly visits to us in neighbouring Lincolnshire, would impart rural lore and show me how to find the best branches to carve into walking sticks, or how to make a bow and shoot elder-tipped arrows.

      Aged twelve, Hartley was packed off to prep school in Kent in the autumn of 1908, but was invited to Bradenham in the following August by a rather grander classmate, Moxey (his surname an approximation of The Go-Between’s Maudsley). The hall – the ancestral home of Henry Rider Haggard – had been rented by the Moxeys, and it was at Bradenham where Hartley found the inspiration for his book’s class-warfare cricket match, its grand dances, its late dinners, and one of the most memorable opening lines in literature: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’

      Unlike Leo – and possibly Hartley himself, who later hinted that he had experienced a similarly character-forming event during his stay at Bradenham – I did not see something nasty in the woodshed during those Norfolk summers. Hartley’s book, with its naïve narrator – the embodiment of ‘greenness’ in his newly gifted Lincoln Green suit – who is privy to an adult world beyond his comprehension, certainly fed into my novel The Listeners. However, the most outwardly apparent influence was Walter de la Mare’s enigmatic thirty-six-line poem which gave me the title, as well as a template for my novel’s mood, and its key location: a tumbledown cottage among the trees being subsumed by the unrelenting forces of nature. There was no such ‘ghost house’ in the woods around my grandmother’s house – at least not one I ever came across – something I should probably be grateful for. Spooky cottages in the heart of the forest are not safe retreats for youthful visitors in ghost stories and fairy tales.