Edward Parnell - Ghostland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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