'Shades of Darkness' was a mid 1980s series for Granada TV that presented adaptations of unsettling tales by authors - some famous names (Agatha Christie) and some less so (May Sinclair) - this particular episode is based on the short story of the same name by L.P. Hartley originally published in 1931 in his collection 'The Killing Bottle'.
The story here revolves around a house haunted by the vengeful ghost of a young woman murdered by her violent husband whose revenge involved possessing the bodies of those she asks to carry her across the threshold of the house and in whose corpse she leaves again in the manner suggested by the title.
Carol Royle gives a predominantly strong performance in the lead and Peter Machin is entertainingly manic as her doomed fiance, there's a fun and barbed performance from Heather Chasen and Ken Kitson (Last of the Summer Wine's 'P.C. Cooper') is the de rigeur rake leaning local with the all the information on the legend of the ghost, Lady Elinor (played by Samantha Gates who, trivia fans may like to note, was one of the two children on the cover of Led Zeppelin's 'Houses of the Holy' album).
Directed with a fairly gentle hand by Gordon Flemyng (director of both Peter Cushing Dr. Who movies) from a script by Alan Plater, who also adapted May Sinclair's 'The Intercessor' for the same series, this is a less satisfying story than that other that never quite manages to be spooky and has a spectacularly unlikely conclusion. It is though eminently watchable and, like the rest of the series, an always welcome stab at producing sympathetic adaptations of golden age supernatural tales in the vein of the BBC's M.R. James adaptations at a time when they weren't being made.
Oh and cat lovers please consider yourselves warned.
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For '3 Wyrd Things' I ask various creative people whose work I admire to tell us about three oddly, wonderfully, weirdly British things that have been an influence on them and their work - a book or author, a film or TV show and a song, album or musician.
(photo by K Walne)
This month: Edward Parnell
Edward first came to my attention in October 2019 with the publication of the hardback edition of his excellent Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country.
Ghostland tells of his "search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands." and of the influence these places have exerted over some of the countries greatest writers of the uncanny such as Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson and M.R. James whose work he had returned to during turbulent times in his own life.
Alongside this the book also functions as both an autobiography and memoir of his relationships with the various members of his family and of the birdwatching hobby he shared with his brother in a moving meditation on love and loss and the power of stories, themes he also explored in his 2014 novel The Listeners (UK).
Ghostland is published in paperback on the 15th of October 2020 and you can buy it here - UK / US.
We urge everyone with an interest in the writers we feature here on Wyrd Britain to check out Ghostland and we are immensely pleased to be able to present to you his selections.
The Go-Between
L. P. Hartley
(Buy it here - UK / US)
Choosing just one book for this list is so difficult – I cycled through any number of contenders including: The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James, Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, The Usborne Guide to the Supernatural World, the stories of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen or Walter de le Mare, or Janet and Colin Bord’s gazetteer of ancient sites, Mysterious Britain...
In the end though, I’ve settled on L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953). It’s a wonderful, haunting novel, about the naivety of youth, about class, about the mysteries of the English countryside (and its weather) – and about the complicatedness of human relationships. Along the way there are childish spells and curses, and significant encounters with a brooding deadly nightshade plant (“It looked the picture of evil and also the picture of health, it was so glossy and strong and juicy-looking”); Hartley himself also happened to be a very competent writer of supernatural short stories.
Above all though, The Go-Between is a novel dominated by an overwhelming sense of yearning for that which has been lost (whether that’s innocence, hope, or just time), and of the difficulties of trying to re-examine and make sense of our half-buried memories. It’s something that’s encapsulated in the book’s famous first line, a line which surely everyone is familiar with:
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
At the novel’s heart is its young protagonist Leo Colston, whose aged older self begins his backwards-looking journey after discovering his childhood diary from 1900, hidden in the bottom of a cardboard box filled with various other forgotten reminders of that golden age: empty sea-urchins, two rusty magnets that have lost their magnetism, and “one or two ambiguous objects, pieces of things, of which the use was not at once apparent”.
Leslie Poles Hartley was born at the end of 1895 in the Fens at Whittlesey, not far from my own childhood home in south Lincolnshire. As fellow flatlanders, Hartley and I were bewitched by the otherness of the wooded Norfolk countryside after being raised among the empty expanse of all those breeze-stripped washes and ruler-straight Fenland droves. In the summer of 1909, Hartley was invited by a rather grander classmate, Moxey (his surname an approximation of The Go-Between’s Maudsley), to stay at West Bradenham Hall, a few miles from my own grandmother’s small west Norfolk cottage (Bradenham became Brandham in the novel). The hall – the ancestral home of Henry Rider Haggard – had been rented by the Moxeys, and it was at Bradenham where much of Hartley’s later inspiration for the novel originally stemmed. The novel’s setting in Norfolk is another aspect that draws me to it, given that I have now myself lived in the county for longer than I have anywhere else. (The excellent 1971 Joseph Losey film adaptation starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates was also filmed in my adopted county.)
The Go-Between, 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, a slice of WWII-set Eastern gothic, brooding nature, and family secrets set in a village based around the tiny hamlet in which my grandmother lived. And it also fed into my second book, the narrative non-fiction Ghostland, in which I attempt my own rather Leo-like examination of various haunted writers, artists and filmmakers, as well as my own haunted past…
Song
Windy Old Weather
Bob Roberts (1960)
My musical tastes are rather eclectic, albeit also quite rooted in the past – ranging from ‘60s garage and Northern Soul, through to New Wave, ‘80s electronica, ‘70s-era Springsteen, and various whimsical soundtracks to the children’s TV series of my youth (like Bagpuss or The Moomins). I’m also partial to the odd spot of folk music and, with a strong love of the ocean, have become strangely attracted to old sea shanties. One such that really sticks with me is on an EP single I own dating from 1960 titled Windy Old Weather. It includes wonderful artwork and an extensively illustrated booklet, describing itself as a “record of sea shanties and saltwater ballads with skipper Bob Roberts”.
Alfred William “Bob” Roberts (1907–1982) was a sailor, folk singer and collector of traditional British maritime songs. He was also the author of a number of nautical books, and known for various appearances in the 1950s on BBC radio and television. As well as being a vocalist, he also played the melodeon, a “British chromatic button accordion”.
I enjoy all of the shanties on the record, but the one that really sticks out for me is the title track. Its back and forth rhythm mimics the North Sea’s swell, and it has me hooked with its opening line: “As we were a-fishing off Haisboro’ Light…” (Haisboro – spelled, in true Norfolk fashion as Happisburgh – is a village on the county’s north-east coast that’s gradually being washed away by the unrelenting sea.)
As the song progresses we’re introduced to various fishes, which in turn breach out of the water and seemingly speak to the crew of the boat – they half-taunt and tell the fishermen of the turning weather, warning them that they ought to head back towards land. It’s all rather magical and poetic (“Then up rears a conger as long as a mile / Winds comin’ easterly, he says with a smile”), certainly whimsical (I could picture it, for instance, as one of the stories told by the rag doll Madeleine in Bagpuss), but utterly compelling – and all delivered in Roberts’s endearing salty Dorset drawl.
It’s a song that makes me long to be at the coast, gazing down from those crumbling cliffs by Happisburgh Light into the grey-dark of the sea. It also makes me want to write about the ocean, a challenge that hopefully one day I’ll undertake.
Film
Dead of Night
(Ealing Studios, 1945)
(Buy it here - UK / US)
Warning – this contains spoilers
“If only I’d left here when I wanted to, when I still had a will of my own. You tried to stop me. You wouldn’t have done if you’d have known,” says Mervyn Johns’s troubled protagonist Walter Craig to Frederick Valk’s Freud-like psychiatrist Dr Van Straaten, prior to the inevitable, nightmarish end sequence of the classic 1945 Ealing Studios portmanteau horror film Dead of Night. Inevitable, because Craig is a man who wakes each morning from the same unconscious, barely recalled terror – and because he has already informed us how events are set to play out.
At the start of the film, Craig arrives in a reverie of déjà vu at a Kentish farmhouse he’s never previously visited, summoned there by a man he’s unacquainted with to look into redesigning the place. The architect has the dawning realisation that the house forms the backdrop to his nightly recurring dream, and that his fellow guests, all uncannily familiar to him despite their having never met, might be mere phantoms in his head.
Dead of Night contains five embedded narratives recalled by the occupants of the farmhouse. The first concerns a premonition of an avoided future – its most memorable moment is the fateful line uttered by Miles Malleson’s bus conductor/hearse driver: “Just room for one inside, sir.” (The segment is loosely based upon a short story by E. F. Benson.)
The next, a gothic children’s Christmas party that’s haunted by the ghost of a murdered small boy (and inspired by the murder at the heart of Kate Summercale’s true-crime book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher), is much more atmospheric, as is the third tale, that of an antique mirror that possesses its owner. Some questionable light relief is provided by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne’s comedic, ghostly golf shenanigans (a reprise of their sport-obsessed cameo in Hitchcock’s 1938 The Lady Vanishes), before we come to the last and most celebrated of the stories, in which Michael Redgrave’s unhinged ventriloquist Maxwell Frere is driven insane by his papier mâché companion.
However, it’s the film’s masterful, playful framing device (directed by Basil Dearden) that sets Dead of Night apart, providing both its end and its beginning. Because, at its climax we witness, once more, Craig’s identical arrival along a tree-lined country lane that followed on from the opening credits. First, though, we must spin back four minutes, to the moment Mervyn Johns’s character rises from his chair in the flickering, fire-lit lounge.
Craig saunters towards the camera and the seated Dr Van Straaten, blankly demanding why he had to set into motion what’s about to come: “Oh Doctor, why did you have to break your glasses?” Craig towers behind the psychiatrist, removing his tie and strangling the larger man with a casual ease. A voice in his head urges Craig to hide and suddenly he finds himself in the familiar surroundings of the Christmas masquerade of the film’s second section.
The teenage Sally Ann Howes and a massed rank of costumed children urge the murderer to join in their game of hide and seek. Craig flees up the same shadowed staircase Howes herself had previously traversed en route to offering comfort to the ghostly young Victorian victim, only this time the scene is skewed at an angle that recalls another film with a similarly mind-blowing ending: Robert Wiene’s masterpiece of German expressionism The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919). Craig pauses in front of the haunted mirror of director Robert Hamer’s third segment, which shimmers in a psychedelic haze, prior to accosting Hayes and dragging her to the attic. There, he strikes the blow to her face he earlier predicted he’d be powerless to prevent.
Without warning, Craig is seated alongside the malevolent, foul-mouthed puppet from the final story (stylishly directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, as was the Christmas party). Hugo urges Craig to “take a seat, sucker”, as the camera pans around the gathered cabaret faces that leer down at the guilty man – and the audience. The strangler is carried aloft to a prison cell manned by Miles Malleson from the first tale: “Just room for one inside, sir,” he once more intones, this time with added relish. On the opposite side of the cell from where Craig cowers, sits Hugo, who, in the most menacing scene of the film, takes to his feet and begins to walk. The crowd of onlookers grin like hungry wraiths through the bars of the door as an undersized actor in dummy make-up strides towards Johns and places his hands on the architect’s throat, before the shot pulls rapidly back to reveal the silhouetted darkness. Now Craig is lying in the bland, comforting surroundings of his own house, awakened by the sound of the phone beside his marital bed that’s ringing to summon him, once more, to that all-too-familiar cottage.
It’s a future of purgatorial dread and guilt that must hardly have been the uplifting tonic conflict-weary audiences were expecting when the film opened in London just one week after the second world war had finally reached its own grim conclusion.
It’s also a film that I can endlessly rewatch, marvelling at the way its storylines entwine and at how masterfully its ending – the most difficult of things to pull off – is handled.
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Cynthia Asquith (ed)
Arrow Books Elizabeth Bowen – The Apple Tree Hugh Walpole – A Little Ghost L. P. Hartley – The Cotillion Ann Bridge – The Buick Saloon Algernon Blackwood – A Threefold Cord … Arthur Machen – Opening The Door Shane Leslie – As In A Glass Dimly W. S. Morrison – The Horns Of The Bull William Gerhari – The Man Who Came Back Mrs. Belloc Lowndes – The Unbolted Door Oliver Onions – “John Gladwin Says” Philip MacDonald – Our Feathered Friends Cynthia Asquith – “God Grante That She Lye Stille”
Originally published in 1931 I stumbled across this 1963 reprint in a small, scruffy animal charity shop recently. I obviously recognised the name gracing the cover from her other books that I have here and a glance inside showed a line-up as tantalising as it is obscure.
Elizabeth Bowen
As I've mentioned before these anthologies often overlap. There are authors that appear regularly and this one has several in the shapes of Algernon Blackwood, Hugh Walpole, Elizabeth Bowen & L.P. Hartley and certain stories which seem to constitute a 'greatest hits' of the supernatural. Well, refreshingly none of those are present here and indeed there was only two stories that I'd read before and neither of them to excess.
The book begins with Elizabeth Bowen's 'The Apple Tree', a story of grief and remorse made manifest in the form of the titular tree. It's a moving piece but one that suffers at it's conclusion for an attempt at an enigmatic ending. Such is not the case with Hugh Walpole's ' A Little Ghost' which is the story here I'm most familiar with and one I like very much indeed as two lonely souls find solace in each others company.
L.P. Hartley
There are a group of stories within the book that feel like they most express the books original publication date and L.P. Hartley's 'The Cotillon' is one of them. It tells of the belle of the ball and of the man she has, potentially, wronged. It's witty and charming in an Agatha Christie sort of way and just as macabrely bloodthirsty.
It's followed by the other story that I've previously read, Ann Bridge's 'The Buick Saloon'. With it's story of colonial heat and repressed emotions freed amongst the expats of Peking it's an odd little tale of curiosity and the thrill of the unknown that nevertheless stays much too much in the mundane for my tastes.
Never one for the mundane, globetrotter, author par excellence and bearer of the perfect ghost story author name, Algernon Blackwood provides us with 'A Threefold Cord...' where a bachelor, bewitched by a woman glimpsed at a party in his childhood home becomes drawn into events far beyond his control and fortunately discovers that friendship is more powerful than family.
Arthur Machen
And so we arrive at the reason this book kept sitting so restlessly on the shelf and demanding it's turn in the sun, the chance to read an Arthur Machen story that I hadn't already (there are many I'm pleased to say). 'Opening the Door' is a story with it's feet in his journalistic career that relates the disappearance and reappearance of an elderly, bookish clergyman. It's a glorious read. Restrained and mysterious and, as often seems the case with Machen, alive with the promise or perhaps menace of unseen worlds parallel to ours into which one can step as easily as opening a door but which perhaps aren't so easy to leave again.
Shane Leslie's 'As In A Glass Dimly' is a bit of a non entity sharing with Machen's piece a journalistic conceit it is a poor mimic that can only emulate the merest hint of the unease and imagination of its predecessor. W.S. Morrison's 'The Horns of the Bull' with it's folktale trappings feels particularly out of place and William Gerhardi's 'The Man Who Came Back' is a short, witty but essentially see-through read.
Oliver Onions
We're on sentimental ground for the next story, 'The Unbolted Door' by Mrs Belloc Lowndes which shares with it's successor - Oliver Onions' 'John Gladwin Say...', a theme of loss and grief that has permeated a family in the first instance and a place in the case of the second, although any sense of melancholy is immediately shattered by the cacophony made by 'Out Feathered Friends' in Philip MacDonald's tale.
The book ends with it's longest story by Asquith herself - editors privilege. 'God Grant That She Lye Stille' is the story of a country doctor, his beautiful patient and her malevolent ancestor. It's an engrossing read that made me desperately need to shout instructions at the ineffective (understandably but frustratingly so) Doctor as his patient slowly slips through his fingers.
I am so very pleased to have found this book. I very much like these ghostly anthologies but every know and again one appears which just stands out as having been assembled with real care and insight and this is definitely the case here and any effort to track a copy down would be greatly rewarded in the reading.
If
you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us
continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the
blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain
Who better to
investigate the literary spirit world than that supreme connoisseur of
the unexpected, Roald Dahl? Of the many permutations of the macabre,
Dahl was always especially fascinated by the classic ghost story. For
this superbly disquieting collection, he selected fourteen of his
favorite tales by such authors as E.F. Benson, Rosemary Timperley, and
Edith Wharton.
In his introduction to this collection Dahl makes a big thing about how he read 749 ghost stories and had only found 32 that he deemed to be any good; of those he includes 14 here. One of them, 'Playmates' by A.M. Burrage, is my favourite of all the ghostly tales I've read over the years and a few of them - Robert Aickman's 'Ringing the Changes', Edith Wharton's 'Afterward' and Marion Crawford's 'The Upper Berth' - are staples of these sort of books. Of the rest they can best be described as a tepid selection.
A.M. Burrage
Of these remaining stories a couple such as L.P. Hartley's 'W.S.', Rosemary Timperley's 'Harry' and Cynthia Asquith's 'The Corner Shop' have a flavour of those 'unexpected tales' that Dahl himself was famous for. A few such, such as the ever readable J. Sheridan le Fanu's 'The Ghost of a Hand' are a little cliché or lovely but a little bit twee like Timperley's other tale 'Christmas Meeting'. Some are just bad - 'Elias and the Draug' by Jonas Lie and 'The Telephone' by Mary Treadgold - and a couple proved to be a delightful surprise - E.F. Benson's 'In The Tube' and A.M. Burrage's 'The Sweeper'.
It must be said I was expecting more from this collection. I thought a writer like Dahl would be able to assemble a collection to beat all others but this one rarely seemed to sparkle and was often a bit of a chore. It did serve to remind me though that what I really need to do is more fully explore the writing of A.M. Burrage.
A year or so ago I read another anthology edited by Susan Dickinson called Ghostly Experiences which was a very fine read that boasted a beautifully drawn cover. Both books were taken from a single hardcover volume called 'The Restless Ghost'. It would seem that that other volume hogged the limelight as it is a vastly superior set to this but that isn't to say there's little to recommend here.
Opening the proceedings is indeed Leon Garfield's, 'The Restless Ghost' which tells of a prank that leads to unexpected consequences of fear and redemption in a story where the innocuous illustrations belie the truly terrible fate facing it's prankster protagonist.
Up next is a staple of these anthologies, W.W. Jacobs' 'The Monkey's Paw' where greed and wishes are shown to be unfortunate bedfellows, particularly for your offspring.
L.P. Hartley is an author that I've encountered a few times and who has yet to grab me. I thought his 'Feet Foremost' would be the one to finally do so as it's a nicely desperate and tense haunted house story that keeps you on tenterhooks right up until it falls apart in it's finale.
W.F. Harvey
'August Heat' by W.F. Harvey on the other hand has a suitably creepy premise that is absolutely nailed at the end in a manner that reminded me of those 'Tales of the Unexpected' episodes where it's shown that you can't cheat fate.
'The Return of the Native' by William Croft Dickinson is a supernatural revenge tale that is entertaining enough but is a little too breathless in it's headlong charge to the end to be wholly satisfying. It's followed by 'Coincidence' by A.J. Alan (a Bletchley Park cryptogrtapher during WWII) which has a fun little idea at it's heart and is realised well but is a tad too obvious to really satisfy.
The ubiquitous M.R. James tale is up next with 'The Rose Garden'. For me one of his weaker stories that never really manages to build into the genuinely creepy atmosphere he was so accomplished at.
To end, the book leaves the realm of the supernatural altogether with Kenneth Wyatt's ghost dance tale 'Ghost Riders of the Sioux' which tells of two settler family's experiences around the time of the Sioux nations adoption of the Ghost Dance movement. It's an interesting read but entirely out of place here.
As I said earlier a mixed bag and certainly the poorer relation to the other volume but not entirely without merit.
I jumped on this book when I saw it in a cluttered second hand bookshop in Cheltenham because of the Nigel Kneale story that I hadn't read before; I'd have bought it anyway but that was the clincher. There were a few other firsts in there too so let's take it one story at a time.
Starting things off is 'The Squaw' by Bram Stoker and it's tale of feline revenge as a rather stupid American tourist is given a medieval comeuppance by a particularly angry she-cat. I've only ever read one Stoker tale before - 'The Judge's House' - which I really enjoyed and this one was fun also. I really must get around to reading that copy of Dracula that's sitting on my bookshelf.
Next is only me second experience of Robert Aickman. I'd managed to entirely miss him and now I've read him in two books in a row - 'Ringing the Changes' in '65 Great Tales of the Supernatural'. 'No Stronger Than a Flower' is a quietly odd little tale of newly weds that sees the wife relenting to her new husbands comments regarding her appearance in a most odd and unpleasant way.
Hugh Walpole
Hugh Walpole's excellent 'Tarnhelm' was one of three familiar stories here as a young boy is sent to stay with his two uncles only to discover that there's something quite unlikeable about one of them and he finds himself in serious danger.
The fourth story gives me my first chance to read an Agatha Christie story, 'The Gypsy' is a light but gratifying tale of premonition, fate and love wrapped up in a breakneck read that still manages to feel complete and satisfying.
Another anthology regular, Algernon Blackwood's 'A Case of Eavesdropping', takes a young man to a boarding house where bumps (and blood) in the night are commonplace.
And so we arrive at the Nigel Kneale tale. Kneale only ever published one non Quatermass book, a short story collection called 'Tomato Cain and Other Stories', and it's from that his haunted house story 'Minuke' is the most anthologised so to get a chance to read another was a real treat. 'The Pond' is a short but sweet tale of revenge on a strange old taxidermist.
L.P. Hartley
Roald Dahl provides a tale that is straight out of his 'Tales of the Unexpected' style with a story that mixes a dead husband, his newly liberated wife and some gruesome post-mortem science with the promise of some well savoured revenge.
L.P. Hartley's 'The Two Vaynes' is by far the poorest story here with large plot holes in a fairly pointless plot of revenge for a pretty slight leading to revenge for a larger crime.
The Hartley story is followed by longest piece as Ray Bradbury's 'The Next in Line' tells of a young woman's descent into madness in a small Mexican town. It's beautifully written but I found it to be quite unsatisfying with a very poor finale. My preference in a ghostly or weird story is for a British setting - or
at the furthest European - so the Bradbury was a step outside my happy
place but still an enjoyable excursion as what Bradbury I've read in the
past was always very readable as it, mostly, was here.
Frank Baker
Frank Baker's 'In The Steam Room' is notable only for it's narrators long list of possible deaths which do raise a smile but the story itself which sees a middle aged neurotic foresee a violent death inside a sauna is fairly innocuous.
The same can be said of 'The Interlopers' by Saki as two feuding Carpathian lords are trapped together in a deep forest giving them time to sort out their quarrel.
Of the final three stories one proved itself to be stylish but ultimately empty, the second to be slightly pointless and the final one to be an old favourite whose title I didn't recognise.
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen's 'The Cat Jumps' is a haunted house story without any actual ghosts as the new owners and their party guests at a house famous for the gory murder committed there become obsessed and bewitched by it's reputation . Ambrose Bierce's 'The Boarded Window' continues this theme with a remembrance of the reasons behind a sealed window in a deserted log cabin.
The book ends with Joan Aiken's lovely little twisted tale, 'Marmalade Wine' that finds a walker chancing across the country home of a retired surgeon only for things to go horribly awry.
As I've mentioned in previous reviews I do have a love for these old (this one is 1966) anthologies and this proved to be a most enjoyable one. The selection is admirably light on ghostly goings on and heavy on supernatural revenge and retribution and is very much worth hunting down for anyone with a love of the weird.
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