When is a ghost story not a ghost story? We talk about being “haunted” by the past and so on. It would be a shame to give away too much of the plot of this story to those who have not read it. Let’s just say that a man, the last survivor of his siblings, has the idea of buying his childhood home and recreating it as it was during his happiest years.
It seems an impossible project, but then circumstances combine to make it possible. The enigmatic title refers to a game the children used to play in the garden. In the story we are presented with a lush, idyllic dream of Cornwall. The overall effect is rather reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling’s story They.
Benson was well-connected in the world of early 20th century supernatural writing. He was one of the audience when M R James read his first ghost stories to a group of undergraduates at Cambridge, and he maintained a friendship with James. He knew Henry James too, staying with him at Lamb House in Rye. Benson took over the lease and made Lamb House famous as “Mallards” in the Mapp and Lucia novels. He saw a ghost there, an incident fictionalised in Joan Aiken’s 1991 novel The Haunting of Lamb House.
He wrote more than fifty “spook stories” as he called them, among the most famous The Bus Conductor, a story of premonition coming true. His best stories are quite the equal of anything in the genre. His descriptive talents and sense of place mean that you can recognise a real-life location even if he does not name it.
However, it has to be said that the creation of suspense is not his strongest point. What he does have is the ability to be supremely effective in stories that involve predestination, the sense of proceeding to an inevitable conclusion. Pirates has this, and also another element that makes Benson distinctive in the genre; the ghosts, if ghosts they are, are benign rather than malevolent. It stands apart from his other stories, being richly nostalgic and consoling, somehow, rather than frightening.
The story becomes all the more interesting if one is aware that it is fairly autobiographical, and the Cornish setting is indeed where Benson spent his childhood years with his large brood of brothers and sisters when his father was Bishop there. Pirates was published in More Spook Stories in 1934, towards the end of Benson’s life.
By writing the story, Benson was doing what his character did within it, re-visiting the scenes of childhood. He is not the only writer to have done this at the end of a long career. One thinks of Agatha Christie’s Postern of Fate, where the house is again, a re-creation of her childhood home. There is also Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, set around Greene’s childhood landscape of Berkhampstead.
The ending of Pirates leaves scope for a follow-up, but I can’t say too much about that without spoiling this marvellous story for those who have not had the pleasure of reading it yet.
The Good Reader 