Edward Parnell - Ghostland - In Search of a Haunted Country

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.

Chapter 3

Growing up surrounded by the sterile farmland of the Fens I was starved of trees, a feeling that made me appreciate their pathless pleasures all the more whenever the chance came.

The woods enthralled me.

Our nearest woodland of note required a half-hour drive to the edge of the neighbouring town of Bourne, where the hills begin to rise from the flatness – to get there on one of our infrequent sylvan family outings we had to pass through Twenty, the village with the idiosyncratic sign. The woods I became most familiar with, however, were not on the far side of that Moon-twinned place, though they seemed a world away. In the opposite direction, across the River Nene and its nearby Norfolk border – the same stretch of monotonous mud and water where the moribund King John may have lost his treasure some seven hundred years before – were the meadows and woods that encircled my grandmother’s house. Those fields and trees, which seemed so full of stories, shadows and secrets, scorched themselves into my memory and into the pages of my first novel.