Things that Go Bump in the Night

The comedian Jenny Éclair, when given the subject of Things that Go Bump in the Night on the radio game show Just a Minute, declared that she hoped that if anything went bump in the night in her house, it would be the headboard, due to her having wild and exuberant sex.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I thought I would say something about ghost stories and haunting (not to say haunted) places.

In October 1978, I went to London for a year to do my MSc at Imperial College, in the South Kensington campus. Although my MSc was in statistics, and rather mathematical statistics at that, I had an ambition to be a writer of fiction, and I thought that a writer ought to be well read. On the campus was a decent enough fiction library and during that year the books I read included:

Moby Dick, Herman Melville

Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe

Humphrey Clinker, Tobias Smollett

Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

Albert Angelo, BS Johnson

Madame Bovary, Flaubert

Edinburgh, David Daiches

The Watch that Ends the Night, Hugh McLennan

Confessions of a Justified Sinner, James Hogg

Pere Goriot, Balzac

The Erasers, Alain Robbe-Grillet

The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan

 

All pretty demanding material, you might comment. Robinson Crusoe was particularly hard work, around 200,000 words, and the chap’s time on the desert island is less than the first half of it. But in addition to all the worthy stuff above, I read several Raymond Chandlers and the collected ghost stories of MR James.

 

The latter contain the most creepy moments I have ever encountered in literature, film, drama or television, with the possible exception of the television and stage versions of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black. The stories were written in the early 20^th century, and have the mixture of Victorian and Old Testament morality of retribution: punishment of human greed, curiosity or hubris. There is a particularly frightening one called Rats, which caused me to look nervously round my 1960’s-built hall of residence landing and stairwell the morning after I read it. This story concerns an academic taking a few days in an inn on the East Suffolk coast, to do some reading and writing in peace. One of the bedrooms on the same upper floor as his is kept permanently locked. His explorations suggest that someone or something living is in the room, and on his last day, he filches a key and looks in.

 

‘And as noiselessly as possible he stole to the door and opened it. The shattering of the illusion! He almost laughed aloud. Propped, or you might say sitting, on the edge of the bed was- nothing in the round world but a scarecrow! A scarecrow out of the garden, of course, dumped into the deserted room… Yes, but here amusement ceased. Have scarecrows bare bony feet? Do their heads loll on to their shoulders? Have they iron collars and links of chain about their necks? Can they get up and move, if never so stiffly, across a floor, with wagging heads and arms close at their sides? And shiver?’

 

How scary is that swift change from relief to horror? I am told that there is a similar episode in Stephen King’s The Shining, which has comparable terrifying effect.

 

One of the reasons that I borrowed the book from the library in the first place, in between wading through all that highbrow glue above, was that my dad had recommended one story in particular: Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. This has another academic, staying at an inn on a North Sea coast golfing resort called Burnstow. The protagonist foolishly blows a whistle he has found on the site of a long-gone Templar church, and alone in his hotel room that night is visited by the fiend he has called up. There is another moment of pure terror, when this spirit takes on a body formed by the sheet of the empty second bed in his room: ‘what he chiefly remembers about it is a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen.’

 

My dad had said to me that the fictional town of Burnstow was based on St Andrews in Fife, and as we all are when somewhere near our home appears in a published book, he was rather proud of this. On reading Monty James’ own introduction to the collection, I found that this was a mistake on my father’s part. The town is based on Felixstowe in Suffolk, although with golf links, dunes and groynes, it could have been St Andrews before the First World War.

 

Which brings me to another reason for my affection for these stories: in addition to the cosy world of Cambridge academics and retired booksellers that the ghostly visitations disturb, they are set in my adopted country of the East of England. Suffolk has been described as the most haunted county in Britain, and indeed all of what used to be called East Anglia has a haunted aura, most eloquently evoked in Edward Parnell’s brilliant and moving  memoir, Ghostland.

 

During the strange year of 2020, sometimes more horrifying in its events than any supernatural fiction, we had two trips to the North Norfolk coast. On our 30^th wedding anniversary, 30^th June, we had a day out at Overstrand, a few miles clockwise round the coast from Cromer. It was one of those typical British seaside jaunts where you have to be wrapped up in jumpers and waterproofs, but we did have a walk along the coast to Cromer, passing the cliffs which my dad had abseiled down during his Royal Artillery basic training in the Second World War. We also had a couple of days in October, just before the Autumn lockdown in a rented house in Sheringham, a few miles anticlockwise from Cromer.  This was a lovely break. We were staying in a large, draughty and somewhat eerie town house in Sheringham, but had most of our meals in the Robin Hood, a welcoming pub on the main street. We crammed a lot of coastal walks into two days, and it was here that I noticed how beautiful and how occasionally sinister is the countryside by that North Norfolk Coast. The photographs give you an idea of this rather unsettling beauty.

 

MR James was a bookish but very sociable academic, with varying positions, including assistant director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Provost of King’s College, Cambridge,  Provost of Eton and indeed for a while Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. He was apparently a scholar of some brilliance, in particular in medieval social history. The introductions to collections of his works always note that, ‘He never married,’ often a coded admission that he was gay. This may well be the case. Whatever his sexuality, it is definitely true that he was remembered by contemporaries as having great charm, in male, female and mixed company.

 

For me, he is a kindred spirit in his attachment to the East of England, qualified with respect for its mysterious and ghostly heritage. I mentioned our whiteboard with future destinations in a previous blog. I must remember to add North Norfolk and East Suffolk.