Edward Parnell

Ghostland


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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:

      Photo (Walter de la Mare) Hulton Deutsch/Contributor via Getty Images

      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.’

      In ‘Crewe’, another