Читать книгу Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country - Edward Parnell - Страница 11

Something of a dread feeling starts to rise inside me as I cross the Great Ouse, a mud-edged monument to river engineering that in 1981 became home for a few days to a disorientated immature walrus that was eventually repatriated by air to Greenland. At the roundabout a few hundred yards past the bridge, close to where King’s Lynn’s now-demolished sugar beet and Campbell’s Soup factories once formed distinctive waymarkers, I turn my car onto the A17. I’m slipping back in time, back to my childhood, though time itself has seemed to slow as the traffic is moving at a slug’s pace, the line of cars in front of me having their progress curtailed by an inevitable tractor. Elsewhere, such hold-ups at least allow drivers space to appreciate their surroundings, but here, on a soot-grey day, there’s little to savour, just endless brown fields that merge into the horizon, broken up by occasional mean stands of poplars or ugly, asbestos-roofed agricultural buildings.

It’s an artificial, man-made landscape, reclaimed in part from the sea. We learnt about it at school, about Cornelius Vermuyden and the Dutch-led drainage of the seventeenth century, and of the earlier history of this ague-ridden backwater: the watery world where in 1216 King John is said to have lost his royal treasure on an ill-fated crossing of one of the estuaries of the Wash, having a few days before in King’s Lynn contracted the dysentery that would shortly kill him; or of the Anglo-Saxon rebel Hereward the Wake who led Fenland resistance to the newly arrived Normans, but was more familiar through having lent his name to the Peterborough-based radio station my classmates and I would listen to – in particular hoping they’d read out the name of our school on a snowbound day and that it wouldn’t be opening, a rare mythic event that actually came to pass on two occasions. Mostly though, the story of the area’s past is vague in my mind, like the inconstant lie of the land in the days prior to pumping stations. Even my own connections with the region seem increasingly tenuous, liable to be leached away by one of the local rivers: the Great Ouse, the Nene, the Welland. Or the River Glen, which my grandfather – a real-life incarnation of a character from Graham Swift’s Waterland – lived alongside.

Waterland was published in 1983 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the same year. It is a novel about the forces inherent in human nature that tear people and families apart, how past events haunt the present. But, above all, for me it’s a book about the unnerving flat landscape of my youth. Though I must qualify this, because it would be wrong to regard the Fens as forming a solid, distinctive whole; the country of my childhood had its own boundaries based upon the places we’d visit regularly as a family, stretching a varying number of miles in each direction from our house, but outside of which the more removed outposts of flatness seemed alien and otherworldly. One such locality that we occasionally passed through was the tiny cluster of residences that formed the village of Twenty. In 1982 it acquired a new black-lettered sign that sat below its official name – ‘Twinned with the Moon’ it read; soon afterwards some local joker spray-painted the retort ‘No Atmosphere’ beneath.

In my reading of the novel, Waterland has its setting among the ‘Black Fens’ beyond Wisbech, a town which is itself reworked by Swift into Gildsey, with the real Elgood’s brewery standing in for the book’s fictional Atkinson’s. Despite being only a forty-minute drive from my home, Wisbech was an unacquainted place, less familiar to me than the geographically more distant London, which most years we would make a pilgrimage to on the train. Wisbech was merely somewhere we skirted on visits to Welney, where my mother took us to watch the winter gatherings of wild swans that sought refuge on the dark fields – terrain only slightly more hospitable than their native Iceland and Siberia.

Thomas Bewick, the eighteenth-century illustrator and author of the landmark History of British Birds, whose surname is commemorated by those squat-necked Arctic swans we would watch feeding on potatoes on the floodlit washes, also features tangentially in M. R. James’s story ‘Casting the Runes’. A victim of the story’s black-magic curse is sent in the post one of Bewick’s woodcuts that ‘shows a moonlit road and a man walking along it, followed by an awful demon creature’. If he has not concocted his own work by Bewick, James is most likely referring to the same tailpiece vignette that so disturbs the young Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë’s novel – a tiny extraneous illustration tucked into the blank space at the end of the 1804 ornithological tome’s chapter on the black-throated diver.* According to Brontë’s heroine, Bewick’s terrifying etching depicts a ‘fiend pinning down the thief’s pack’. And though there’s nothing that necessarily identifies the man as a law-breaker, the act of carting a heavy bag down a dark country lane does seem suspicious; the attached medieval-looking winged devil that’s doing its best to pry open the contents of the sack does little to assuage our suspicions that the bearer has been up to no good and is getting his hellish comeuppance.

The narrator of Waterland, Tom Crick, is a history teacher who is being encouraged to take early retirement due to budgetary restraints at his school. ‘We’re cutting back on history,’ his headmaster drily informs him, though ultimately it’s the mental breakdown of his wife that speeds the process along. A precocious boy in his class questions the point of learning about what has gone before: ‘What matters,’ Price declares, ‘is the here and now. Not the past.’ So, in order to demonstrate how history does still result in consequences for the here and now, Tom Crick begins to tell them of his own eddying past, the history of the watery landscape of the ‘fairy-tale place’ of his youth.

Waterland swirls between earlier days and the present, between the personal family dramas of the Crick and Atkinson families, and of the shifting silts of greater events such as the Napoleonic or First World Wars, whose eventual settling has a future effect on the imprecise borderlands of the far-off Fens. And, in a nod to Melville’s Moby-Dick, there is even an eight-page digression into the slippery natural history of the European eel, a species my grandfather, a keen angler, was well acquainted with.

I read the novel aged sixteen, a year or two after my brother had first turned its pages. It’s testament to the book’s power that my father, who usually distracted himself with the crime novels of Ed McBain or the thrillers of Frederick Forsyth (who he recalled meeting when they both worked in King’s Lynn at the end of the 1950s), and my grandfather – more comfortable with the westerns of Louis L’Amour – both seemed to take to it. For me, I think (and probably for them too), Waterland’s initial magic came from its setting; although its events largely occurred in a time well before I was born and in a skewed version of a place some twenty miles distant, it was still a landscape I felt I knew – and a landscape I’d never seen depicted in fiction before.

The key attraction, however, was that the Cricks were lock-keepers. Because Grandad had been one too, looking after the antiquated sluices at the confluence of the Welland and the Glen, and at the terminus of the Vernatt’s Drain. In common with the Cricks of the novel, Nan and Grandad lived in a riverside cottage that came with the job. It too was a fairy-tale dwelling of sorts, located in a place whose own name was something of a misnomer: Surfleet Reservoir (though Seas End on maps), the latter word referring to the ultimately failed eighteenth-century plan to divert river water into an artificial lake to aid the drainage of local farmland. My grandparents’ post-war brick bungalow, a veritable palace among the nearby wooden holiday chalets and ramshackle fishermen’s huts that lined the Glen, was where my mother spent her teenage years before she left to marry my father beneath the leaning steeple of the main village’s church, moving six miles upriver to the house where I grew up. ‘The Res’ (as locals still refer to it) was an odd enclave populated by weekenders who moored their boats on the seaward side of the sluice – a deep tidal channel fringed by tall reeds – from where they would head out for a spot of sea fishing, or others who preferred to spend the summer sitting outside their chalets chatting to their neighbours while their children played in the river. By all accounts the place had a distinct sense of community back then, and even today has a different feel to the rest of the uniform, arable-dominated area – bringing to mind some timeless Dutch canal-side idyll.

My grandparents departed this watery haven on Grandad’s retirement, moving to a ground-floor 1970s council flat in nearby Spalding fitted with wide doorways, a high-seated toilet, and red pull-cords that would summon the local old people’s warden in an emergency. The freedom of the lock-side home I cannot remember the inside of (I would have been two when they left it) was exchanged for more practical – but more humdrum – disabled-friendly accommodation that could better cope with Nan’s ongoing, crippling physical deterioration from rheumatoid arthritis.† As her condition worsened she developed a complete reliance on my grandfather who, in a strange role reversal for a man born in 1909, became her chief carer and cook, lugging her into her wheelchair to transport her to the bathroom and bedroom. Occasionally, the pair of them would argue with a causticity that now, I think, was borne out of Grandad’s frustrated inability to improve the situation. But, at other times, there was a tenderness in the way he gently pipetted artificial tears into her desert-dry eyes.

I follow the familiar route that hugs the river and leads away from my home town – I can still recall every curve even after all this time. This was the way I would ask my parents to come if we were returning from Peterborough of an evening, in the hope I’d spot an owl sitting on one of the fence posts strung along the bottom of Deeping High Bank. Sometimes Mum would pick me up from school and drive Grandad and me at dusk over the undulating road, while we watched through the windows for the silent-winged birds. In my formative years I claimed a kind of ownership of the place, mistakenly believing it was named ‘Deeping Our Bank’ – for the hours we spent here, it might as well have been.

On the face of it there’s not much to get excited about: the first stretch skirts a grass-covered strip to the left and wide fields of crops to the right, while a barbed-wire fence borders the roadside ditch. Today it’s empty, but over the years various birds of interest alighted here before us: a pair of stonechats, neat little passerines, usually took up winter residence; once, a russet-barred sparrowhawk gripped a bloodied linnet in his talons; and in spring, Pinocchio-billed snipe crouched on the wooden posts in full view, their cryptic brown plumage offering no camouflage against the green of the backdrop. But the highlight was the ghost-lit barn owls that fluttered ethereally in our headlights, or materialised, seemingly from nowhere, in the late afternoon sunshine.

Always you wanted owls.

Past where the road jinks to the left and twists up the bank, bringing the river into view, is a pale-bricked barn that looked out of place, like some Spanish mission picked up and transposed to the middle of this flatness. Just beyond, tucked behind the bank, is a pond. We rarely saw anything on it – except once, when Mum braved treacherous snow on one of the fabled occasions when school was closed to drive the two of us along the track. The river was frozen solid, but not the pit: a redhead female smew, a small, toothed diving duck from the continent, had found the last ice-free stretch in the vicinity.

That day sits in my memory like one of my favourite childhood books, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising – the second (and arguably best) in the five-title series of the same name. The 1973 children’s novel followed eight years after the Cornwall-set Over Sea, Under Stone and, in truth, feels very different and aimed at an older audience (Cooper had not originally planned on it being part of a series). It dispenses with the child leads from the opening book (though they feature again later), retaining only the wizard Merriman – King Arthur’s Merlin. What we do get in The Dark is Rising, however, is the arrival of eleven-year-old Will Stanton, soon to discover that he’s the last of the Old Ones, on the side of the Light and tasked with keeping the forces of Dark at bay in a Manichaean struggle. It is a book I loved when I first read it (I would have been a similar age to its central character), especially its depiction of the longed-for snowy Christmas that renders its time-shifting Thames Valley setting into a magical, albeit malevolent, wilderness. It’s a remarkable evocation of the wintry English countryside (reminiscent of the snow in The Children of Green Knowe), particularly when you learn that Cooper left England for Massachusetts in 1963 with her American husband, writing all but the first of the sequence in either New England or the couple’s house in the British Virgin Islands:

The strange white world lay stroked by silence. No birds sang. The garden was no longer there, in this forested land. Nor were the outbuildings nor the old crumbling walls. There lay only a narrow clearing round the house now, hummocked with unbroken snowdrifts, before the trees began, with a narrow path leading away.

The scene reminds me of an earlier remembrance – the first time I saw proper deep snow, which had fallen on our garden overnight, anaesthetising the land and deadening all sound. Dad and I placed sticks in the snow-hills that the wind had sculpted, marking each one with a makeshift wooden trig point that reminded me of the mountains I longed to climb on the holidays we took, far removed from those flatlands.

The river is choppy, its banks a dirty green – there’s not a hint of snow in the sky – but I’m surprised by the new areas of wildlife habitat that have been cut alongside the water since the last time I was here: miniature inlets and scrapes, and a fledgling reedbed that would have been perfect back then for me to scan. In this same spot we watched transfixed on a correspondingly biting afternoon as a bare-chested man bobbed beside the river’s metal-reinforced far bank, a few strokes behind a paddling cow that he was trying to coax back onto dry land. My father knew him, he was a local farmer.

At the aptly named Crowland, a parliament of rooks is feeding amid a ploughed beet crop. I slow as I pass the town’s Civil War-ruined abbey, commemorated in a gothic sonnet by the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare, whose village of Helpston is only nine miles away, and whose wife spent her dying days in my home town:

We gaze on wrecks of ornamented stones,

On tombs whose sculptures half erased appear,

On rank weeds, battening over human bones,

Till even one’s very shadow seems to fear.

I stop in the heart of the nothingness, pulling onto the head of a dirt drove that branches off at a right angle to the main route’s undulating, cracked tarmac. It’s a bleak place, the very same stretch of road where, as teenagers, my friends and I would switch off our headlights while motoring at speed, briefly plunging ourselves into blindness. We were young and rash, fortunate not to suffer the classic Fenlander’s end and find ourselves drowning in two foolish feet of lonely water at the bottom of one of the ubiquitous steep-sided dykes that line those routes. A patch of ice at the wrong moment could have created a local tragedy and transformed us into a carload of ghouls.

If we had perished that way, perhaps one of us might have been fated to a curious, brief half-life like the main character Mary Henry, a church organist, in Carnival of Souls. At the start of the dreamlike, low-budget black-and-white 1962 movie she washes up on a sand bar more than three hours after the car she was a passenger in has plunged into the Kansas River, killing her two companions. She moves from the scene of the tragedy to Utah, where she finds herself stalked by a mysterious figure – ‘the Man’, played by the film’s director Herk Harvey – and a cast of undead dancers at the abandoned Saltair bathing pavilion that looms out of the Great Salt Lake’s fluctuating dried-out flatness, a landscape not unlike the Fens. The film’s eerie discordant organ music has a similarly hypnotic effect on Mary as the hurdy-gurdy of Lost Hearts does on Stephen. And, indeed, as both soundtracks seem to have on me.

‘It was though – as though for a time I didn’t exist. No place in the world,’ Mary says, after a fugue-like episode where she cannot hear external sounds or interact with her fellow townsfolk, before the song of a bird brings her back into the now. The young drowned organist, cast in the role of an awkward outsider, has been allowed to live out a brief window of her lost youth: events not actualised that should never have come to pass. Her limbo is a fleeting foretaste of what could have been.

Like my family’s own future among these formless fields.

Fear and paranoia were staples of growing up during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Made in 1973, the year I was born, Lonely Water is a public information film I vividly remember seeing at the cinema as a boy, before whatever main feature I’d been brought to see.‡ In recent years it has acquired a deserved cult reputation for its dark, warning content. Watching it now you’d think there was little danger that any child who saw Lonely Water would set foot on a riverbank or the shoreline of a reservoir ever again. Yet I did still go fishing with only a friend for company, and we often did end up messing about near the water, which makes we wonder whether the film’s message was lost on their target audience. Perhaps the known risk added an illicit thrill we found impossible to resist?

Just a minute and a half long, the film opens with a panning shot across a black, twig-strewn pond, accompanied by Donald Pleasance’s chilling voiceover – ‘I am The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, ready to trap the show-off, the unwary, the fool’ – before the camera lingers on a hooded Grim Reaper standing in the shallows. We cut to another hooded figure, a blue-coated boy, who is playing with his friends on the muddy bank of a gravel pit. One of his companions, a lank-haired urchin, is poking a stick at a football that’s fallen into the water. We look up at them from the position of the ball, towards the down-jabbing twig and the four shouting children; the Spirit looms behind them, unbeknown, as the boy slips on the bank. Without learning the fate of the show-off (though the implication is obvious), we switch to a bucolic scene – a tranquil duck-filled millpond. This time a lone older lad is leaning forwards, supporting his weight on the bough of an overhanging tree, again to stab at some untouchable object. Donald Pleasance’s narrator informs us with great delight: ‘This branch is weak. Rotten. It’ll never take his weight.’ We hear the snap as it falls, the cloaked voyeur observing the unfolding tragedy through the nearby reeds.

The final scene jumps to a close-up of a ‘Danger No Swimming’ sign, spelled out in large red letters. ‘Only a fool would ignore this … But there’s one born every minute.’ A pile of clothes and a pair of shoes have been left among a mountain of detritus as the camera pans to the pit where a boy is struggling and shouting for help. ‘Under the water there are traps: old cars, bedsteads, weeds, hidden depths. It’s the perfect place. For an accident.’

Watching Lonely Water again, the grisly relish Donald Pleasance’s Spirit takes in his description of these lurking dangers is one of the most unnerving elements about it – this brief voiceover role might well be the most frightening of his long career. The lad, fortuitously, is rescued from the water by two sensible passing children who chide him in thick cockney accents – ‘Oi mate, that’s a stupid place to swim’ – and the Spirit is exorcised, leaving just a discarded robe on the muddy ground that is thrown into the water by his rescuers. But Pleasance is determined to have the last word, the Spirit’s voice reverberating as the camera lingers on the cape that is by now sinking beneath the brown waves:

‘I’ll be back. Back. Back …’

In works of unsettling fiction, Britain’s inland waterways are not commonly a haunted geographical feature, though we have a vengeful spirit born of water in M. R. James’s Dartmoor-set ‘Martin Close’, and a canal trip looms large in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s ‘Three Miles Up’. There is also a story that I cannot seem to shake by an unfairly neglected author of the second half of the twentieth century: A. L. Barker’s ‘Submerged’.

Audrey Lilian Barker was born in Beckenham, Kent, in 1918, and died in a nursing home in Surrey in 2002. She wrote eleven novels and numerous collections of stories (which include several supernatural tales); her novel John Brown’s Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1970, and her debut collection of short works, Innocents, won the inaugural Somerset Maugham Award in 1947. ‘Submerged’ is part of that collection and a powerful piece. It opens with a vivid description of a rural English river and its pastoral surrounds – of the purple loosestrife, yellow ragwort and red campion that cover its banks. Yet in this mild, sun-dappled scene we are soon reminded of the menace that lurks beneath the water’s gentle eddies.

He wasn’t supposed to swim in the river anyway, there was some talk about its being dangerous because of the submerged roots of trees. Peter knew all about those, they added the essential risk which made the river perfect.

In the striking mid-century artwork of the first edition’s cover, the story’s adolescent protagonist is depicted as a stylised green figure part-way through a plunging dive. As the boy Peter engages in his lone swims he delights in exploring the tangled willow roots and branches that form his new benthic world; as readers we delight too, initially at least, as Barker paints an intoxicating picture of wild swimming that would make Roger Deakin proud. Having discovered a sort of tree-formed underwater tunnel, Peter has the realisation that he must explore its hidden folds, an epiphany made concrete by the sudden ethereal apparition beside him of a fleeting kingfisher, ‘a flicker of cobalt, bronze and scarlet’.

I too remember my first proper view of a kingfisher, a squat-tailed sprite on the railing beneath the dilapidated railway bridge at the back of my aunt’s house. It was Christmas Day 1987 and Dad and I had gone for a walk to try out my new big joint birthday and Christmas present – a telescope, so that now on trips with my brother I would have my own optics to look through at all those distant waders and wildfowl. The kingfisher perched below us for two, perhaps three, seconds before propelling itself like a tightly wound clockwork toy down the right-hand bank of the Vernatt’s Drain, the uniformly straight channel that ran all the way to my grandparents’ former home.§ Finally the bird came into focus, on a wooden jetty that protruded through the reeds, the middle of its back illuminated electric-blue through my scope despite the dullness of the day. I was elated. Even my father, who though mildly interested in wildlife was no wide-eyed naturalist, knew we’d been honoured with a glimpse of the fantastic.

After Peter witnesses his kingfisher in the story, he dives back down to his tunnel, conquering its dark secrets, before coming to rest on the water’s sunlit surface in an afternoon reverie. This heady state is ruined by the appearance of a stranger: ‘It was a woman in a red mackintosh. No longer very young, and so plump that the mackintosh sleeves stretched over her arms like the skin of scarlet saveloys.’ The woman orders the half-concealed boy out of the water, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of her presumed partner, an oafish brute who, she tells Peter, wants to murder her. ‘He won’t lay a finger on me if there’s a witness and a chance he’d swing for it …’ Peter emerges reluctantly, remaining close to the thick cover of the bank’s vegetation. The man arrives and the pair argue, but the expected violence does not come. The boy’s sacred bathing place has, none the less, been sullied by their presence, its rhythms punctured by the intrusion of this odd, aggressive couple, with their air of illicit adult sexuality.

As the woman leaves, she steps on a weak spot on the bank and falls into the water directly above the tunnel. She doesn’t surface and the man stands half-heartedly poking a stick into the depths below – like one of the lads in Lonely Water – before fleeing across a neighbouring field. Peter concludes that the woman must have swum further along the river and emerged while he was watching the man’s cursory search. Pleased the equilibrium of his exclusive waterway has been restored, Peter makes a final dive. Reaching the entrance to the cave-like feature he finds it blocked: ‘His fingers slid on something soft; his dive carried him violently against a heavy mass. The impact swung it a little away, but then, as he crumpled on the bottom, it bore down on him from above with dreadful, leisurely motion.’ Kicking hard he manages to free himself: ‘The mystery of how the woman left the river without a trace was solved. She had never left it, she was down at the bottom, out of sight.’

Peter returns home and mentions nothing about the incident to his parents or friends, even when weeks later it’s revealed that a blacksmith from a nearby village has been found in connection with the woman’s murder and is likely to hang. He realises a miscarriage of justice is about to occur but still doesn’t say anything. We are left with the chilling image of his corrupted waterway: ‘Those two had done something to the river. He couldn’t swim there any more, his skin crept at the thought of the brown water, the soft, pulpy mud. And the underwater tunnel – it belonged to the fat woman now.’

Peter abandons his former haunt, in future joining the other boys who swim in the nearby quarry. He has developed a vital childhood coping mechanism, one that most of us, at some point I think, have employed: ‘He had the weapon of youth, the power to bury deep that which was more profitably forgotten.’

Certainly, I have.

I follow the Welland the few miles to where it runs into the bird-rich basin of the Wash. Today there are well-appointed nature reserves nearby at Frampton and Freiston, complete with proper hides and even a visitor centre. However, when I was growing up ‘the Marsh’ meant the esoterically named Shep Whites – the lonesome southern stretch of shore that stretches from the mouth of the river to just north of the village of Holbeach St Matthew. (Rather mundanely, ‘Shep’ White was a local shepherd who ended up making his home beside the sea wall.) Occasionally, we used to go to the marsh at weekends when I was small, though I could never memorise the labyrinthine set of narrow single-track roads that Dad plotted a course through to get us there – they seemed to change each time we visited.

Locating a route remains as difficult but, fittingly, for the final winding stretch Lou Reed’s ‘Halloween Parade’ shuffles into play on my phone through the speakers of my radio – my brother’s cassette tape of the 1989 album New York on which the song appears was an ever-present fixture in the car we shared at the start of the 1990s. This track, with its elegiac roll-call of those lost to Aids, seems particularly poignant today, putting me in mind of earlier visits and faces I too will never see again. Finally, assisted by the sight of a particular Second World War pillbox, and finding the familiar crucial left turn, I arrive at the makeshift parking area behind the sea wall. It’s tattier than I remember, a fly-tipper’s paradise with a broken-open piano littering the scrub, its redundant loose keys strewn among the long grass.

I used to love the anticipation before you ran up the grassy bank: would the tide be in so that you’d feel yourself standing at the seaside, or would you be confronted with a green-and-brown expanse of mud and saltmarsh, the distant water barely visible at the edge of your vision? In the summer the landscape seemed kinder, its harsh edges softened by the pale blooms of cow parsley that grew rampantly along the dykes. My grandad called it ‘kek’, and one of his sluice-keeping tasks would be to burn off it and the other weeds that would clog the drainage ditches later in the season; in his eighties and early nineties, when I drove him around his old stamping ground, he would wistfully point out tinder-dry stands of dyke-side grasses he’d like to put a match to.

Peering into the distance you could see the shimmer – a sort of Fata Morgana – of ghostly half-real structures further round the coast. Like the ugly squat slab of the Pilgrim Hospital, the name honouring the group of Christian separatists who, in 1607, attempted to sail from the port of Boston to find religious freedom in the Netherlands (and later the New World), only to be betrayed by their skipper and end up imprisoned in the town’s guildhall. Or the 272 foot ‘Stump’ of Boston’s towering church, where in September 1860 an ominous-seeming cormorant alighted, its arrival presaging the simultaneous sinking a continent away in Lake Michigan of the Lady Elgin and the loss of 279 souls, including the town’s MP, Herbert Ingram (who also happened to be the founder of The Illustrated London News), and his fifteen-year-old son.¶

The unfortunate, portentous bird was shot the next morning, the badly stuffed specimen spending the following forty years on display in a local pub before being mislaid and vanishing from view.

One time, as a teenager, I came here late at night with my friend Piete – the spelling of his name reflecting the area’s Dutch history – after we’d liberated ourselves from the constraints of small-town existence by passing our driving tests. The parking area was empty, illuminated by the full moon, but we didn’t linger long after stepping from the car because the cacophony coming over the sea wall from the roosting curlews and oystercatchers seemed amplified to an unnatural degree, like the ‘strange cries as of lost and despairing wanderers’ that M. R. James describes in ‘Lost Hearts’. Later, while at university, I visited with my girlfriend at dusk and we became spooked by the weird greenish tone that the sky over the Wash had taken on: the vista lends itself to such fancies. Now I think it must have been the northern lights pushed far to the south due to an unusually high level of solar activity.

Today, as on most of my impromptu visits, the water is way out. The sky is ashen, the panorama drab. A few brent geese, small dark-bellied wildfowl that winter in East Anglia and breed in western Siberia, are flying over the far mudflats; their name is thought to be derived from the Old Norse word brandgas, denoting ‘burnt’ – a reference to the species’ dusky colouring. I follow the sweep of the sea bank around to my left. On the inland side the amorphousness of the marsh gives way to an artificial angularity: vast arable fields punctuated by ragged hedges and occasional coverts, bisected by wide drainage ditches. It’s quiet, the only sound the familiar piping whistle of a lone redshank that flicks up from a creek.

As well as being a childhood Sunday afternoon ride out, this place was later to become a regular hangout for my brother and me, though by then we’d learnt to try and time our visits to coincide with the rising waters, arriving an hour or so before the waves were at their height, when the birds would be pushed up onto the small artificial spit of land that extends out from the pumping house. Once a tame common seal lolled in the water a few feet away, eyeing us curiously, while on other fortunate occasions we sat entranced as whirlwinds of waders newly arrived from their Scandinavian and Arctic breeding grounds, settled close by in the late-summer sunshine.

Surprisingly, this very spot was also chosen as a location for the somewhat underwhelming 1992 adaptation of Waterland. The nondescript brick pumping station was temporarily transformed into a Victorian two-storey, tile-roofed sluice-keeper’s cottage. Chris and I pushed Mum, now in a wheelchair like her mother before her, along this same stretch of bank soon after filming had finished in the autumn of 1991, the three of us impressed by the sham house in our midst; on the way back to the car, we paused to look at a fresh-in fieldfare – a wintering migrant thrush from northern Europe, its name literally meaning ‘the traveller over the field’ – that landed, cackling, on the barren ploughed ground across the dyke. Watching the film at the cinema the following year – though Mum was not with us to see it – it was hard to suspend disbelief at the Cricks in their illusory cottage, or when Jeremy Irons ascended in a few steps from what was obviously the inland Cambridgeshire Fens to these desolate coastal saltmarshes.

I stand on the bank contemplating my own history, studying the curve of two parallel creeks that meander towards the promise of the sea. I came here with my cousin a day after my dad died, to try to kill some of the empty, dragging time before the funeral. In the edgeland adjacent to the car park, a migrant grasshopper warbler – for once not skulking at the back of some reedbed – was balanced on top of a bramble, from where it delivered its song with gusto: a high-frequency staccato my ears would now strain to hear, the sound like a fishing line being reeled in. Across the mud shimmered the brooding, blocky mirage of the Pilgrim Hospital, which my father had entered a few weeks before and never left.

For me this is a melancholy place, haunted by the ebbs and flows of its past associations.

In the final paragraph of Waterland, as Tom Crick scans the surface of the Great Ouse for his lost brother, Swift surely alludes – ‘We row back against the current …’ – to one of the great last lines of literature, and a book, The Great Gatsby, I was to study a few months after wheeling my mother in her chair along the bank, all those memories ago: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

Out on the Wash a group of shrimp trawlers cluster together in what is left of the dying daylight.

I shall not rush to return.

Seven miles as the brent goose flies, though a winding eighteen by car, and I am between a white lighthouse and the canal-straight channel of the Nene. ‘Down here the river has a surging life of its own, compensating (for those attuned) for the flatness of the surrounding country,’ states Robert Aickman, author of forty-eight hard-to-classify ‘strange tales’ and also, perhaps somewhat incongruously, the co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association.** The building before me is Sutton Bridge’s East Lighthouse; its near-identical twin is located on the opposite bank. Built between 1829 and 1833 and designed by John Rennie, the architect of Waterloo Bridge, to delineate the river’s mouth, the East Lighthouse was an early home of the conservationist Peter Scott, son of the ill-fated Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Aged twenty-four, Scott arrived at this secluded stretch of river in 1933 to find a purpose for himself; he was to live here, on and off, for the next six years. It was the place where he honed his wildlife painting and wrote his first two books, and where he kept his original collection of wildfowl on the expansive pools that used to be found on the saltings between the lighthouse and the Wash.

Those tidal lagoons have long gone, reclaimed in the 1960s and 70s into arable fields that stretch as far as you can see. My father brought me here one Sunday afternoon to an open day being held by the local farmer, and often we would detour along the top of the Nene’s east bank on the way back from visiting my grandmother in Norfolk. Later Dad got me a summer job alongside my brother at a nearby, dusty vegetable-canning factory; we looked out over the wavering wheat towards Scott’s erstwhile home as we stacked boxes of tinned baked beans bound for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, while the shed’s sole soft-rock cassette compilation, Leather and Lace, played in a never-ending loop. That summer was among my best times, I sometimes think, even though the work was tedious and physically challenging – I was sixteen and my world was awash with possibilities, had yet to start coming apart.

Despite the transformation of Scott’s marshland, there are still a couple of ponds behind the lighthouse that hold a remnant selection of exotic waterbirds, including a pair of beautiful red-breasted geese and a sextet of sneering snow geese (a line of black that contrasts with the pink of the rest of the bill – the so-called ‘grinning patch’ – really does give the snow goose a contemptuous expression). This latter North American species gave the title to the bestselling novel by Paul Gallico, who loosely based his story of a reclusive lighthouse-dwelling painter on Scott and a wild pink-footed goose that, in 1936, took up residence among the lighthouse’s fledgling bird collection, returning again in following winters.††

Robert Aickman’s guide to boating holidays, Know Your Waterways, also namechecks Scott’s lighthouse as a notable landmark. Aickman knew Scott – who happened, in addition, to write the introduction to Aickman’s barge book – and the two men, surprisingly, remained friends after Scott’s first wife, the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, left the conservationist in August 1947 for the thickly bespectacled and besotted Aickman. The couple’s relationship itself ended a little over four years later (in Howard’s memoir Aickman comes across as a rather jealous and controlling figure), though not before the couple had collaborated on a debut 1951 collection of supernatural stories, We Are for the Dark. Each of them contributed three tales, including Howard’s supremely ominous ‘Three Miles Up’, my favourite in the slim volume, which displays the enigmatic qualities we now regard as key characteristics of an ‘Aickman-esque’ story – pointing perhaps to the uncredited influence that Howard’s writing was to have on her lover as, mainly during the 1960s and 70s, he wrote the majority of his critically lauded work. ‘Three Miles Up’ seems autobiographical in its depiction of a narrowboat journey gone awry, and possibly prefigures the rivalries and eventual falling out between Aickman and Tom Rolt, as well as Howard and Aickman’s own parting soon after the publication of their joint collection. The story’s ending offers a purgatorial, nightmare-inducing vision that’s hard to beat:

The canal immediately broadened, until no longer a canal but a sheet, an infinity, of water stretched ahead; oily, silent, and still, as far as the eye could see, with no country edging it, nothing but water to the low grey sky above it.

The unspecified inland English canal setting of ‘Three Miles Up’ was relocated to the Fens in an effective, though loose BBC adaptation of Howard’s story, with the transformation of the central male characters into a pair of estranged brothers, and the addition of a supernatural whistle that could be straight out of M. R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. The drama’s final scenes were shot at the mouth of my own River Welland, the waterway that flowed along the top of my street and which I crossed each day on my walk to school. The crew had only a risky two-hour window, the director Lesley Manning tells me, filming where the river enters the Wash downstream of my grandfather’s Seas End bungalow and adjacent to the marshes of Shep Whites. Those inundated mudflats make a good match for the ‘infinity’ of water that opens out before the reader at the story’s grim conclusion.‡‡

The Nene flowing hurriedly before me now, which has dropped precipitously on the retreating deluge to reveal sludgy cliff-like banks, has its source in Northamptonshire, and runs through an artificially straightened channel past Peterborough, where it becomes tidal. The river’s outfall was completed around 1830, with 900 men and 250 horses labouring to dig out the last seven-mile stretch that replaced the meandering former route. And although in Waterland’s final act Graham Swift has Tom Crick and his father scanning the waters of the Great Ouse – located a few miles away at King’s Lynn – for a sign of his drowned brother Dick, the adaptation of Swift’s novel shot the scene here on the Nene, with Scott’s old lighthouse appearing briefly in frame. The mud of the river and the marshes around Sutton Bridge is often also cited as a possible resting place of King John’s fabled lost treasure. The story finds its way into a book partly set around these same creeks and channels that is regarded by many M. R. James devotees as one of the few great novels in his tradition: The House on the Brink.

In November 2017 I noticed an obituary in my local paper, the Eastern Daily Press, announcing the death of John Gordon – a 92-year-old Norfolk-based children’s author of whom I was unaware. Jack Gordon, as he was known to his friends and family, was born in Jarrow, Tyne and Wear, in the industrial heartland of England’s north-east, before moving in 1937 as a twelve-year-old outsider to Wisbech, with its antithetical landscape of apple orchards and its boundless fields of sugar beet and potatoes. In his memoir he recalled his Tolly-esque arrival in the Fenland town: ‘A full tide from the Wash had lifted the river’s face to within a foot or two of the roadway and we seemed to be riding through a flood.’ In many regards the place seemed magical to the young Jack, far removed from the abject poverty of post-Depression Jarrow. Later, after a stint in the navy at the end of the Second World War, he returned and became a newspaper reporter for the Isle of Ely and Wisbech Advertiser, where he furthered his knowledge of the town and its surroundings. This familiarity shows in his fiction, in which the unsettling flatness of the landscape is virtually omnipresent. ‘It’s the loneliness and absolute clarity of the line between the land and the sky where you can see for miles that always strikes me with a feeling of magic and mystery,’ he said in a 2009 interview about his last novel, Fen Runners.

The House on the Brink was his second work of fiction, following on two years after 1968’s The Giant Under the Snow, a highly regarded children’s fantasy that centres on the legend of the Green Man. Both were written in Norwich, where Jack had moved in 1962. He wrote his early novels while working on the Evening News, having made the same journalistic journey – junior reporter to sub-editor – that my brother would also go on to make.

I ordered a copy of the out-of-print The House on the Brink from Norwich Library – except for one loan in 2003, its previous excursions from the reserve stores had been in the late seventies and early eighties. This isn’t, it seems, a title in high demand, which strikes me as a real injustice, because Gordon’s second book is a wonderful novel. It does indeed contain strong M. R. James-esque elements within its chapters, drawing most notably on ‘A Warning to the Curious’. But, away from its cautions not to meddle with old secrets – and the arcane forces tasked with making sure any such foolish meddlers are punished – the novel is a world apart from James’s comfort zones. At its core stands a burgeoning first romance between its two protagonists, Dick and Helen, aged sixteen and living in Wisbech (and a nearby marshland village, modelled on Upwell), with a supporting affair between a fragile young widow – the mysterious Mrs Knowles – and her new lover Tom Miller.

M. R. 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.)

I wish I’d read The House on the Brink as a teenager, as it would have appealed to my then whimsical romanticism and I would’ve identified with the brooding writer-to-be Dick as he biked around the vividly rendered, scorched summer Fens: ‘They went out over the flat land, knowing they dwindled until they were unseen, but still he saw the haze of soft hair on her arms.’ But beyond The House on the Brink’s appreciation of my native landscape and its timeless portrayal of adolescent angst, the novel would have thrilled me with its sense of dread, which threatens at times to overcome its characters. This fixes on a rotting ancient log (which at the story’s denouement reveals its true identity) unearthed from the saltmarsh: ‘The stump was almost black. It lay at an angle, only partly above the mud, and dark weed clung to it like sparse hair. Like hair.’

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.

Jack Gordon infuses an unhinging sense of horror into this stump, on the face of it an unlikely object of terror that seems to offer little threat. Yet the blackened wood’s menace is real, as shown in one of the book’s key scenes where Helen and Dick happen upon it along an overgrown marshland drove: ‘And then, where the hedge clutched the gate-post, half-obscuring it, a round head was leaning from the leaves looking at them.’ What is striking is how much of the action takes place during daylight hours and, given that, how effectively the reader, too, is frightened. Terror does not have to be restricted to the darkness: ‘He let the yell of his lungs hit the black head. Black. Wet. It shone in the sun. And he knew what he should have known before. It had come from the mud.’

Although Wisbech itself, where most of the novel’s action takes place, remains unfamiliar to me, some of its present landmarks are easily recognisable in The House on the Brink. They include the Institute Clock Tower and the Georgian residence of the book’s title, a thinly disguised version of Peckover House, now a National Trust property sited, appropriately enough, on a real (and not just metaphorical) road called North Brink, which runs above the dirty, tidal Nene. The young Jack used to walk for miles along its banks, his younger brother Frank later tells me. The old lighthouse that’s mentioned early on in the book as guarding the saltmarshes at the confluence of the river and the Wash must refer to Peter Scott’s former home – perhaps Jack ended up there on one of his long rambles.

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.