Today, as on most of my impromptu visits, the water is way out. The sky is ashen, the panorama drab. A few brent geese, small dark-bellied wildfowl that winter in East Anglia and breed in western Siberia, are flying over the far mudflats; their name is thought to be derived from the Old Norse word brandgas, denoting ‘burnt’ – a reference to the species’ dusky colouring. I follow the sweep of the sea bank around to my left. On the inland side the amorphousness of the marsh gives way to an artificial angularity: vast arable fields punctuated by ragged hedges and occasional coverts, bisected by wide drainage ditches. It’s quiet, the only sound the familiar piping whistle of a lone redshank that flicks up from a creek.
As well as being a childhood Sunday afternoon ride out, this place was later to become a regular hangout for my brother and me, though by then we’d learnt to try and time our visits to coincide with the rising waters, arriving an hour or so before the waves were at their height, when the birds would be pushed up onto the small artificial spit of land that extends out from the pumping house. Once a tame common seal lolled in the water a few feet away, eyeing us curiously, while on other fortunate occasions we sat entranced as whirlwinds of waders newly arrived from their Scandinavian and Arctic breeding grounds, settled close by in the late-summer sunshine.
Surprisingly, this very spot was also chosen as a location for the somewhat underwhelming 1992 adaptation of Waterland. The nondescript brick pumping station was temporarily transformed into a Victorian two-storey, tile-roofed sluice-keeper’s cottage. Chris and I pushed Mum, now in a wheelchair like her mother before her, along this same stretch of bank soon after filming had finished in the autumn of 1991, the three of us impressed by the sham house in our midst; on the way back to the car, we paused to look at a fresh-in fieldfare – a wintering migrant thrush from northern Europe, its name literally meaning ‘the traveller over the field’ – that landed, cackling, on the barren ploughed ground across the dyke. Watching the film at the cinema the following year – though Mum was not with us to see it – it was hard to suspend disbelief at the Cricks in their illusory cottage, or when Jeremy Irons ascended in a few steps from what was obviously the inland Cambridgeshire Fens to these desolate coastal saltmarshes.
I stand on the bank contemplating my own history, studying the curve of two parallel creeks that meander towards the promise of the sea. I came here with my cousin a day after my dad died, to try to kill some of the empty, dragging time before the funeral. In the edgeland adjacent to the car park, a migrant grasshopper warbler – for once not skulking at the back of some reedbed – was balanced on top of a bramble, from where it delivered its song with gusto: a high-frequency staccato my ears would now strain to hear, the sound like a fishing line being reeled in. Across the mud shimmered the brooding, blocky mirage of the Pilgrim Hospital, which my father had entered a few weeks before and never left.
For me this is a melancholy place, haunted by the ebbs and flows of its past associations.
In the final paragraph of Waterland, as Tom Crick scans the surface of the Great Ouse for his lost brother, Swift surely alludes – ‘We row back against the current …’ – to one of the great last lines of literature, and a book, The Great Gatsby, I was to study a few months after wheeling my mother in her chair along the bank, all those memories ago: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’
Out on the Wash a group of shrimp trawlers cluster together in what is left of the dying daylight.
I shall not rush to return.
Seven miles as the brent goose flies, though a winding eighteen by car, and I am between a white lighthouse and the canal-straight channel of the Nene. ‘Down here the river has a surging life of its own, compensating (for those attuned) for the flatness of the surrounding country,’ states Robert Aickman, author of forty-eight hard-to-classify ‘strange tales’ and also, perhaps somewhat incongruously, the co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association.** The building before me is Sutton Bridge’s East Lighthouse; its near-identical twin is located on the opposite bank. Built between 1829 and 1833 and designed by John Rennie, the architect of Waterloo Bridge, to delineate the river’s mouth, the East Lighthouse was an early home of the conservationist Peter Scott, son of the ill-fated Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Aged twenty-four, Scott arrived at this secluded stretch of river in 1933 to find a purpose for himself; he was to live here, on and off, for the next six years. It was the place where he honed his wildlife painting and wrote his first two books, and where he kept his original collection of wildfowl on the expansive pools that used to be found on the saltings between the lighthouse and the Wash.
Those tidal lagoons have long gone, reclaimed in the 1960s and 70s into arable fields that stretch as far as you can see. My father brought me here one Sunday afternoon to an open day being held by the local farmer, and often we would detour along the top of the Nene’s east bank on the way back from visiting my grandmother in Norfolk. Later Dad got me a summer job alongside my brother at a nearby, dusty vegetable-canning factory; we looked out over the wavering wheat towards Scott’s erstwhile home as we stacked boxes of tinned baked beans bound for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, while the shed’s sole soft-rock cassette compilation, Leather and Lace, played in a never-ending loop. That summer was among my best times, I sometimes think, even though the work was tedious and physically challenging – I was sixteen and my world was awash with possibilities, had yet to start coming apart.
Despite the transformation of Scott’s marshland, there are still a couple of ponds behind the lighthouse that hold a remnant selection of exotic waterbirds, including a pair of beautiful red-breasted geese and a sextet of sneering snow geese (a line of black that contrasts with the pink of the rest of the bill – the so-called ‘grinning patch’ – really does give the snow goose a contemptuous expression). This latter North American species gave the title to the bestselling novel by Paul Gallico, who loosely based his story of a reclusive lighthouse-dwelling painter on Scott and a wild pink-footed goose that, in 1936, took up residence among the lighthouse’s fledgling bird collection, returning again in following winters.††
Robert Aickman’s guide to boating holidays, Know Your Waterways, also namechecks Scott’s lighthouse as a notable landmark. Aickman knew Scott – who happened, in addition, to write the introduction to Aickman’s barge book – and the two men, surprisingly, remained friends after Scott’s first wife, the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, left the conservationist in August 1947 for the thickly bespectacled and besotted Aickman. The couple’s relationship itself ended a little over four years later (in Howard’s memoir Aickman comes across as a rather jealous and controlling figure), though not before the couple had collaborated on a debut 1951 collection of supernatural stories, We Are for the Dark. Each of them contributed three tales, including Howard’s supremely ominous ‘Three Miles Up’, my favourite in the slim volume, which displays the enigmatic qualities we now regard as key characteristics of an ‘Aickman-esque’ story – pointing perhaps to the uncredited influence that Howard’s writing was to have on her lover as, mainly during the 1960s and 70s, he wrote the majority of his critically lauded work. ‘Three Miles Up’ seems autobiographical in its depiction of a narrowboat journey gone awry, and possibly prefigures the rivalries and eventual falling out between Aickman and Tom Rolt, as well as Howard and Aickman’s own parting soon after the publication of their joint collection. The story’s ending offers a purgatorial, nightmare-inducing vision that’s hard to beat:
The canal immediately broadened, until no longer a canal but a sheet, an infinity, of water stretched ahead; oily, silent, and still, as far as the eye could see, with no country edging it, nothing but water to the low grey sky above it.
The unspecified inland English canal setting of ‘Three Miles Up’ was relocated to the Fens in an effective, though loose BBC adaptation of Howard’s story, with the transformation of the central male characters into a pai
r of estranged brothers, and the addition of a supernatural whistle that could be straight out of M. R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. The drama’s final scenes were shot at the mouth of my own River Welland, the waterway that flowed along the top of my street and which I crossed each day on my walk to school. The crew had only a risky two-hour window, the director Lesley Manning tells me, filming where the river enters the Wash downstream of my grandfather’s Seas End bungalow and adjacent to the marshes of Shep Whites. Those inundated mudflats make a good match for the ‘infinity’ of water that opens out before the reader at the story’s grim conclusion.‡‡
The Nene flowing hurriedly before me now, which has dropped precipitously on the retreating deluge to reveal sludgy cliff-like banks, has its source in Northamptonshire, and runs through an artificially straightened channel past Peterborough, where it becomes tidal. The river’s outfall was completed around 1830, with 900 men and 250 horses labouring to dig out the last seven-mile stretch that replaced the meandering former route. And although in Waterland’s final act Graham Swift has Tom Crick and his father scanning the waters of the Great Ouse – located a few miles away at King’s Lynn – for a sign of his drowned brother Dick, the adaptation of Swift’s novel shot the scene here on the Nene, with Scott’s old lighthouse appearing briefly in frame. The mud of the river and the marshes around Sutton Bridge is often also cited as a possible resting place of King John’s fabled lost treasure. The story finds its way into a book partly set around these same creeks and channels that is regarded by many M. R. James devotees as one of the few great novels in his tradition: The House on the Brink.
In November 2017 I noticed an obituary in my local paper, the Eastern Daily Press, announcing the death of John Gordon – a 92-year-old Norfolk-based children’s author of whom I was unaware. Jack Gordon, as he was known to his friends and family, was born in Jarrow, Tyne and Wear, in the industrial heartland of England’s north-east, before moving in 1937 as a twelve-year-old outsider to Wisbech, with its antithetical landscape of apple orchards and its boundless fields of sugar beet and potatoes. In his memoir he recalled his Tolly-esque arrival in the Fenland town: ‘A full tide from the Wash had lifted the river’s face to within a foot or two of the roadway and we seemed to be riding through a flood.’ In many regards the place seemed magical to the young Jack, far removed from the abject poverty of post-Depression Jarrow. Later, after a stint in the navy at the end of the Second World War, he returned and became a newspaper reporter for the Isle of Ely and Wisbech Advertiser, where he furthered his knowledge of the town and its surroundings. This familiarity shows in his fiction, in which the unsettling flatness of the landscape is virtually omnipresent. ‘It’s the loneliness and absolute clarity of the line between the land and the sky where you can see for miles that always strikes me with a feeling of magic and mystery,’ he said in a 2009 interview about his last novel, Fen Runners.
The House on the Brink was his second work of fiction, following on two years after 1968’s The Giant Under the Snow, a highly regarded children’s fantasy that centres on the legend of the Green Man. Both were written in Norwich, where Jack had moved in 1962. He wrote his early novels while working on the Evening News, having made the same journalistic journey – junior reporter to sub-editor – that my brother would also go on to make.
I ordered a copy of the out-of-print The House on the Brink from Norwich Library – except for one loan in 2003, its previous excursions from the reserve stores had been in the late seventies and early eighties. This isn’t, it seems, a title in high demand, which strikes me as a real injustice, because Gordon’s second book is a wonderful novel. It does indeed contain strong M. R. James-esque elements within its chapters, drawing most notably on ‘A Warning to the Curious’. But, away from its cautions not to meddle with old secrets – and the arcane forces tasked with making sure any such foolish meddlers are punished – the novel is a world apart from James’s comfort zones. At its core stands a burgeoning first romance between its two protagonists, Dick and Helen, aged sixteen and living in Wisbech (and a nearby marshland village, modelled on Upwell), with a supporting affair between a fragile young widow – the mysterious Mrs Knowles – and her new lover Tom Miller.
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 ref
er 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.
Ghostland Page 5
