Edward Parnell

Ghostland


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good-naturedly, though the narrator thinks he is being left out of some enormous secret by the lady and the little ones, who have by now gathered stealthily behind a bramble bush with their fingers held to their lips. Any revelation is halted by the arrival of a lady from the village, Mrs Madehurst, the owner of the shop; it transpires her infant grandson is seriously ill, and so the motorist volunteers to use his vehicle to fetch a doctor, before being enlisted on an extended expedition to taxi in a nurse.

      ‘Walking in the wood’ – it’s an expression repeated by various locals throughout the story, and whose meaning will soon become clear.

      For this, and its studied, unsentimental build-up and beautifully constructed setting, there are few short stories (ghost or otherwise) that come close to so perfectly expressing the kind of sadness and grief that is on display in ‘They’. The visitor ‘from the other side of the county’ finally accepts why the children are there, and what they are – all that has gone before was wilful self-delusion on his part. Yet even though by this point we too have surely worked out their nature, the story’s denouement is still devastatingly sad: our narrator is hit with the certainty that the hand which grasps his own belongs to his late daughter, and that he must never return to this shade-filled house again.

      He has learned what the villager meant when she spoke of ‘walking in the wood’. It is what the bereaved do to commune with their departed.

      * Deadly nightshade’s Latin name belladonna is thought to have derived from one of the plant’s medicinal properties – extracts employed in eye-drops were historically used by women to dilate their pupils and enhance the attractiveness of their eyes.

       Arkham is a fictional Massachusetts university town that features in a number of H. P. Lovecraft’s tales.

       Sir Stafford Northcote served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Disraeli, between 1874 and 1880.

      § Quite probably in a deliberate nod, Northcote here employs a phrase – ‘infinite distance’ – that is also used memorably in M. R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’.

       You had to press a button on the top of the phone before making a call, and check that the house across the lane wasn’t on the line at the same time. To me as a sophisticated town-dweller this ‘party line’ seemed hilariously primitive.

      ** Brooke won a scholarship to study at King’s College, Cambridge in 1906, a year after M. R. James became its provost. Brooke’s death in 1915 was not the result of a bullet fired by a German sniper, but from sepsis caused by an infected mosquito bite while the naively patriotic twenty-seven-year-old waited to see action with the Royal Navy. James spoke warmly about Brooke in that year’s Vice-Chancellor’s oration, his words echoing those he had earlier written about James McBryde. ‘No one, I think, must call that short life a tragedy which was so fully lived, and spent itself so generously upon all who came in contact with it.’

      †† Rewards and Fairies is also notable for containing the first appearance of Kipling’s most famous and popular poem ‘If—’, which topped the survey of Britain’s favourites; ‘The Way through the Woods’ came forty-eighth.

      ‡‡ Terry’s last theatre role – in 1925, a little less than three years before her death at the age of eighty-one – happened to be a non-speaking performance as the ghost of Miss Susan Wildersham in Walter de la Mare’s now-obscure ‘fairy play’ Crossings.

      §§ The youngsters have, I think, something about them of the playful shyness of Tolly’s elusive Restoration ancestors in The Children of Green Knowe.

      ¶¶ Kipling would also go on to lose his son prematurely. Eighteen-year-old John was shot in the head at the end of September 1915, while serving in France; the boy’s poor eyesight would have rendered him ineligible for active service, but he persuaded his father to pull strings to get him enlisted in the Irish Guards. Two days before his death, knowing he was about to be sent to the front, John wrote home: ‘This will be my last letter most likely for some time.’

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