Tag: Folk Horror

An Evening’s Entertainment by M R James

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An Evening’s Entertainment is one of the less well-known ghost stories by M R James. It appeared in his 1925 collection A Warning to the Curious and Other Stories. The main character in a James story is often a fusty academic type, a sort of exaggerated version of himself. That is the general image of his work, but it obscures the fact that the range of characters and settings in his stories is actually rather wider than that.

Here, a James-style narrator opens the story and laments the fact that the old story books are not very specific about ghosts or folklore. He then goes on to imagine how a grandmother might tell a spooky story to the grandchildren in front of the fire before bed, hence the title. The story is indeed, in a phrase that appears early on, “a pleasing terror”.

One of the children has picked blackberries from a lane that the grandmother was told to avoid by her grandmother. Why is there a clump of fruit bushes in the lane? Because there was a cottage there once, which was the site of strange goings-on. It was inhabited by a man who didn’t work and didn’t mix much in the village. One day he brought an odd young man back to live with him. The pair were often seen out and about at all hours in the woods and on the downs above the village.

On the downs there is a human figure carved into the landscape, and many ancient burial mounds. Something the young man lets slip in a conversation suggests that on their nocturnal jaunts there, this unlikely pair are not alone. They seem to be familiar with the appearance of the people who lived there before the Romans.

This is just the beginning of a series of gruesome events, involving pagan worship, violent death, burial at a crossroads and the “lord of flies”, events long remembered in the village giving the patch of ground in the lane its bad reputation.

There are only two carved human figures in England, the Long Man of Wilmington in Sussex and the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset. I wonder which one James had in mind? Something about this story suggests Sussex to me, perhaps the fact that the figure is referred to as “the old man on the hill”.

James wrote in the preface to his collected ghost stories that he had tried to make his ghosts “act in ways not inconsistent with the rules of folklore”. This particular story is almost the definitive expression of what has come to be known as “folk horror”. It shows, like many of his other tales, that James was particularly skilled at evoking the feel of the English landscape. It rather reminds me of John Masefield’s poem Up on the Downs. I also wonder whether it might have been an influence on Jocelyn Brooke and The Image of a Drawn Sword.  

Up On The Downs by John Masefield

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John Masefield (1878–1967) had a long and productive career in both prose and poetry, but comparatively few of his works are well-known today. He was appointed poet laureate in 1930 when that was a job for life, so held the position for thirty-seven years. His Collected Poems is a hefty volume, yet it is only two short poems, “Sea Fever” and “Cargoes”, that turn up in anthologies. I think there might be other gems waiting to be re-discovered. For example, I recently came across, almost by accident, “CLM”, a poignant poem about his mother, who died when Masefield was a small boy.

I suspect that Masefield has different readerships for different aspects of his work. For example, his 1937 children’s novel The Box of Delights has never been out print, almost having a cult following, helped perhaps by the 1984 BBC television adaptation. His 1917 description of the topography of the Somme battlefield, The Old Front Line, is a masterpiece of descriptive writing and could be called the first battlefield guide. A theme that runs through much of his work is the sense of history in the landscape.

The poem below is another that I discovered through the BBC Radio 3 programme, Words and Music, in the edition entitled The Haunted Landscape. The format of this programme is that the titles of the pieces and their creators are not identified. You can get that information from the programme website. It works quite well if you listen to the programme, then go back and identify the things that made a particular impression on you.

I was amazed when I found out how old it is and who had written it. I had assumed it was by a more recent poet. It actually dates from the first world war period, when Masefield was living at  Lollingdon Farm in Berkshire. I had also rather lazily assumed that the human sacrifice in the 1972 film The Wicker Man was a scriptwriter’s invention. Whether it is an invention or not, the idea is clearly not as new as I thought.

Masefield was too old to be a fighting soldier but did see the western front both as a hospital orderly and later, as a journalist. I have seen it suggested that this poem can also be interpreted as referring to conditions on the battlefield. However one interpretates it, this is a powerful and atmospheric poem, collapsing the distance between past and present with something of the atmosphere of what is now known as folk horror.


Up On The Downs by John Masefield

Up on the downs the red-eyed kestrels hover,
Eyeing the grass.
The field-mouse flits like a shadow into cover
As their shadows pass.

Men are burning the gorse on the down’s shoulder;
A drift of smoke
Glitters with fire and hangs, and the skies smoulder,
And the lungs choke.

Once the tribe did thus on the downs, on these downs, burning
Men in the frame,
Crying to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning
And the gods came.

And to-day on the downs, in the wind, the hawks, the grasses,
In blood and air,
Something passes me and cries as it passes,
On the chalk downland bare.


The Temple by E F Benson

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The Temple by E F Benson was published in a magazine in 1924, and later collected in the volume Spook Stories in 1928. It begins, as so often with Benson, with two youngish, well-off bachelors deciding to take an extended holiday in a pleasant part of the country. It is Cornwall this time, and the two men are soon installed in a large seaside hotel, with its own golf links between the beach and the hotel grounds.

The narrator is a writer and his companion is an archaeologist who plans to investigate some of the antiquities of the county. The local people are superstitious about a nearby stone circle, believing it to be a pagan temple. The archaeologist says it can’t be, because the arrangement of the stones is wrong, but more importantly, it lacks a sacrificial stone in the centre. He is sure there must be a temple site somewhere in the neighbourhood and he is determined to find it.

Later, the two men are aware of an ominous atmosphere while walking in a wood: “. . . I was conscious of some gathering oppression of the spirit. It was an uncomfortable place, it seemed thick with unseen presences.” They think nothing of it, emerging back into the sunshine to come across a pretty cottage that appears to be uninhabited. The hotel is beginning to fill up for the season. Would it be possible to stay in the cottage instead? Enquiries are made and the cottage is indeed available at a knock-down price because the previous occupant committed suicide.

The wood on the hill overlooks the cottage. What are the lights that can be seen moving about in it at night? And just what is the large stone that forms part of the kitchen floor of the cottage?

It turns out that the cottage has been built in the centre of the pagan temple, with disastrous consequences. This is not entirely a surprise to the reader, and as I’ve said before, it’s not really suspense that is the appeal of a Benson story, but the sense of inexorable progress towards a malign fate that cannot be avoided.

He also has a wonderful gift for conveying the sense of place in his elegant, precise prose. His stories are often set in a remote part of the English countryside, with a local large town, such as Hastings, often given its real name but the village or hamlet where the action takes place given a fictional name, allowing Benson some room for invention.

The Temple fits neatly into the genre that is today known as Folk Horror. The central idea is also not as far-fetched as it might appear. After all, something similar happened at Avebury in Wiltshire, where the stones of the circle were knocked down in the eighteenth century and used to build houses in the village that grew up inside it. I suspect Benson might have been inspired by the restoration at Avebury that was beginning at around the time he wrote his story.

I’ve also written about Pirates, another tale by Benson.

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

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The Eagle of the Ninth was a favourite book of mine when I was younger. It was fascinating to re-visit it. Published in 1956, it was aimed at young people, but the only way in which it is a children’s book is that the violence and sex are toned down. The style of writing is enjoyably straightforward, for adults or children, and there is a strong sense of the British landscape. There is no feeling that the author is condescending to a youthful readership.

Set in Roman Britain, or at least the Britain that Rome is trying to subdue, “a place where two worlds met without mingling”, the story concerns the search for the missing standard of the ninth legion, the eagle of the title. The legion marched north of Hadrian’s wall and was never heard of again. Were they defeated in battle by the British and all killed, or did they revolt against their officers?

The young hero, Marcus, invalided out of the Roman army, volunteers to go north with his British companion, Esca, to find out what happened to the legion, and its commander, his father. It is both a personal quest and an official mission.

This book is a very good example of the way in which imaginative writing can bring the past to life in a way that factual history books cannot. There is a powerful sense of what a less-populated Britain was like: “On they went, following the road that now ran out on a causeway between sodden marsh and empty sky, now plunged into deep boar-hunted forest, or lifted over bleak uplands where nothing grew save furze and thorn-scrub.”

When Marcus and his uncle Aquila play a game of draughts by the light of an oil lamp, in what is modern-day Silchester, the reader has a clear impression of the room in the villa as an island of warmth and peace in the darkness of this wild country where “the wind moaned through the desolate woods, the skies wept. . .”

There is a touch of something supernatural about the fate of the legion. Esca saw them marching, and recalls: “But the mist was creeping down from the high moors, and the legion marched into it , straight into it, and it licked them up and flowed together behind them, and they were gone as though they had marched from one world into another.” There is also what we might now call folk horror, with the missing Roman eagle finally being discovered as an object in a pagan ritual.

Marcus has a dream, in which he sees the Roman column marching northwards. In a chilling moment, he realises there are no faces under the metal helmets. Reading now, this sent a tingle up my spine, and at the same time I remembered how exactly the same thing had happened the first time I read it long ago.

Books stay the same but we change and that is part of the fascination of re-reading. Marcus’ shattered leg destroys his hopes of a military career. In the end he is partially cured. He can get around, but with a limp, and is not fit enough to go back to the army. He has to settle for what he has got. As a teenager bursting with health, I did not notice the disability theme here, but I do now.

I am not usually keen on biographical interpretations of fiction, but in this case, it is fascinating to know that Rosemary Sutcliff suffered grave ill-health, spending much of her life in a wheelchair. The vivid action scenes were created purely from her imagination. I don’t think she had ever actually been able to ride a horse, for example.

I have seen it suggested that she is one of the only authors to have been directly influenced by Rudyard Kipling. I think that’s unfair on Kipling, because his influence was so all-pervasive that it can hardly be seen now. For example, where would the modern spy story be without Kim?

Nevertheless, The Eagle of the Ninth does partly derive from three particular stories of his. These are “On the Great Wall” and “A Centurion of the Thirtieth” from Puck of Pook’s Hill and the Indian army story “The Lost Legion”.

There are also several “lost legion” stories from the first world war, about units that seemingly disappeared on the battlefield, that may be an influence. The anecdote about the ghostly legion seen in York to this day is in there somewhere, too.

Perhaps we should see The Eagle of the Ninth as belonging to the post-war period when it was first published, with its disabled young officer hero, missing father, and missing soldiers.

In the end, despite the weather, Marcus decides to stay on and make his life in Britain. It’s clear that we are meant to see him as our common ancestor. This glimpse into the past sees us as the modern descendants of the Romans, but also as the inheritors of something older and stranger.

 

The Image of a Drawn Sword by Jocelyn Brooke

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I discovered this mysterious novel by Jocelyn Brooke via a review in Time Out. My Penguin copy is dated 1983, and was the first re-issue since its publication in 1950.

I had never heard of Brooke, and Penguin must have thought that nobody else had, as the words “with an introduction by Anthony Powell” are quite prominent on the cover.

The narrative in brief, concerns a lonely ex-soldier, now working as a bank clerk and living with his mother in a cottage in a tranquil corner of rural Kent. He is frustrated with life and worried about his health. He meets a young army officer and agrees to start military training with him, in a sort of shadowy territorial unit.

The cover illustration by Tony McSweeney is fascinating in itself. A sad-eyed man in military uniform looks out at us. It is winter and he is wearing greatcoat, scarf, and balaclava under his steel helmet. Behind him is a hedge with a strand of barbed wire above it, and in the distance is a mysterious earthwork and to the left, an oast house. The cloudy sky is a threatening reddish colour, and the dented steel helmet seems to merge into it. Yes, I know, you can’t judge a book by its cover and all that, but I have described this in some detail, because it captures something about the book that Powell’s introduction doesn’t, quite.

Powell is quite keen to compare the novel to Kafka, and this is fair enough, since it undeniably has some Kafkaesque elements, particularly in the later part, where Reynard finds that he has rejoined the army against his will. But the picture on the cover is closer to my feeling that the English landscape, specifically the landscape of Kent, is a major element in this book. Perhaps childhood holidays in the Hythe and Folkestone area had made me aware of the way the countryside here is haunted by a military presence. After all, this is the area of Shorncliffe barracks, the Royal Military Canal, and  Martello towers along the coast, relics of the Napoleonic war and two world wars.

It actually goes back further than that, as Brooke reminds us. The “Roman camp” where Reynard begins his military training regime is thought to actually be an ancient British construction.

The strange shifts of time and place, the mysterious bugle calls in the distance, coming from a location that Reynard can’t quite pin down – it is never clear what is “real” and what is taking place in Reynard’s mind. The landscape itself seems to play a role in all this. For example: “Leaning now, against the gate into the fields, it seemed to him that the very countryside itself was exerting upon him an invisible, indefinable pressure, producing in his fatigued brain an intolerable sense of confinement”. I think the novel is the literary equivalent of the work of some of the painters of the era, such as Paul Nash and Keith Vaughan, where a recognisably English landscape is given a surreal twist.

What is the mysterious “emergency” that is constantly referred to? The Cold War? The Labour Government? A projection of Reynard’s troubled sexuality? Or all of these?

I can imagine a film of this book. It might have something of the atmosphere of David Rudkin’s TV play Penda’s Fen. Indeed, I wonder if Brooke’s novel was an influence on Rudkin’s play, where a young man, troubled by his sexuality, finds a mystery in the landscape. What I can’t imagine is the BBC of today going anywhere near such a project. Perhaps if Mark Gatiss could be persuaded to get involved?

And yet, although it is rooted in the immediate post-second world war period, Brooke’s novel is curiously ahead of its time in some ways. If the term “psychogeography” comes to mind, The Image of a Drawn Sword also has something of the more recent concept “folk horror” about it.