As the road presses higher and the woodland becomes denser, the visibility drops to next to nothing: thick, low cloud has brought a shrouded, stilting opaqueness to the world. I’m in another location Machen fondly namechecks in his work: the ‘green, great and exalted’ Wentwood. At one point a roe deer bounds in front of me, terrified yet drawn by the twin pinholes of my headlamps in the ghostlight. And without warning I am arrived at the site of the infamous Forester’s Oaks where, in ages past, poachers were executed for daring to take a stag or steal a sheep. The vast trees, including the hollowed-out hanging-oak itself, have been gone for more than a century, but as the only living soul among the white-out I am suitably impressed by the eerie ambience. There is no spring birdsong; indeed, hardly a sound at all, except the quiet drip of precipitation onto the undergrowth. I start on the muddy track that climbs to the Grey Hill, but soon realise it’s futile in the mist and that I will see little from its peak should I even find it; I return to my car, relieved when I’ve descended out of the whiteness.
Because in this place white is significant, I’d like to think.
En route to my night’s accommodation I stop off at dusk in another nearby Roman settlement, Caerwent, where I walk along the top of dark stone walls that date from the third century after Christ. I watch a black rabbit hopping among the ruins, which brings to my mind the film Watership Down. Our class crowded together into the hotel lounge to be shown it one evening on a week-long primary school trip to London and its ending caused the supposed toughest boy to cry; were I to see the death of Hazel again now I’m sure it would have the same effect on me.
The next day I try for the Grey Hill once more. This time the cloud has cleared and the woodland is transformed by birdsong, yesterday’s ominous stillness replaced by the pleasant haze of a spring afternoon. Now I can ascend to the ancient rocks on its summit like Professor Gregg before me. And, perhaps, like the central character in my favourite of Machen’s stories – and the reason the whiteness of the Wentwood last night struck me so vividly. Because surely Machen had this place at least a little in mind when he described his Grey Hills in ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’, or ‘the hill of the grey rocks’ above the woods in ‘The White People’.
Written in 1899, ‘The White People’ is a masterful naïve narration by a bewitched adolescent girl (or perhaps just a girl possessing a furiously overactive imagination?) that brings its strangeness to the page in a formally surprising way. It feels ahead of its time, anticipating the modernist first-person streams of consciousness that two decades later – when employed by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner – would seem so innovative. Like the stories from The Three Imposters, this one is bookended by a framing device – in this case a dry scholarly discussion about the nature of sin and evil. I find myself skimming through this opening discourse to get to the good stuff, the embedded ‘Green Book’: the journal in which we learn of the unnamed girl’s disconcerting childhood. It’s a remarkable read, full of cryptic words that put me in mind of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem ‘Jabberwocky’ – the ‘Aklo letters’, ‘Dôls’, ‘Jeelo’, ‘voolas’ – words we can only half-guess the meaning of.¶¶ There are also references to various arcane rites that are never explained: ‘the White Ceremonies, and the Green Ceremonies, and the Scarlet Ceremonies’.
‘The White People’ is a rambling, mesmerising piece of writing that does, I think, effectively capture the voice of a young teenage girl of the period. It’s not easy to take in, given that it’s rendered in large blocks of text with barely the concession of a paragraph to assist the reader, but it has a hypnotic quality that takes us deep inside the narrator’s dreamlike world:
When I was very small, and mother was alive, I can remember remembering things before that, only it has all got confused. But I remember when I was five or six I heard them talking about me when they thought I was not noticing.
The girl recalls overhearing the adults discussing her when she was a toddler, a time when she babbled phrases no one else could understand – words in the ‘Xu language’ about ‘the little white faces that used to look at me when I was lying in my cradle’. Later, aged about five, she remembers being taken by her nurse – who, we infer, is complicit in the events that are to come – to a deep pool in a wood. The nurse leaves her there while she goes off with a tall man who has followed them. And the little girl is alone on a patch of moss as ‘out of the water and out of the wood came two wonderful white people, and they began to play and dance and sing’.
It’s a haunting image of two nymph-like creatures, but the more I read it the more I wonder whether the girl has in fact witnessed her nurse and the man emerging naked from the pool, with their subsequent dancing and singing in fact being the couple engaging in sex. Because when the nurse returns ‘she was looking something like the lady looked’ and she is angry and upset when the girl tells her everything she has seen, making her promise not to say a word about it to anybody. If this is what has happened then, unlike Leo in The Go-Between, the girl seems enchanted, rather than horrified, by this window into an adult future.
After this, the girl’s journal records the momentous ‘White Day’, just before her fourteenth birthday. Her description of her walk up through the woods and into the ominous country beyond resembles the scenery around Wentwood and the Grey Hill, and paints a powerful picture of this history-ridden landscape:
I went up and up a long way, till at last the thicket stopped and I came out crying just under the top of a big bare place, where there were ugly grey stones lying all about on the grass, and here and there a little twisted, stunted tree came out from under a stone, like a snake.
My own ascent of the Grey Hill is less dramatic; I do not snag myself on thorns, and the path, though in places eroded by people’s footfalls and streams of rainwater, is well-marked. It’s a pretty view from the summit, which measures just under nine hundred feet in height, with the Wentwood stretching off to the north and west. The forest is impressive, largely consisting of conifers, with blocks of russet larches bringing colour to the greenness. Up here, at the plateau of the hill, the palette is mainly brown rather than grey, a wide carpet of dead bracken punctuated by leafless dark-branched birches. From somewhere nearby a willow warbler’s slurred song tries to mask the growl of distant traffic – the first of these returning songbirds I have heard this spring.
I search among the undergrowth for the hill’s stone circle; eventually I locate it, surrounded by the stumps of hacked-off trees. According to Hando’s guidebook it is ‘older than Stonehenge’, and although low-key – there are just two standing stones, with the rest of the boulders lying close to the ground – it is humbling to have such history to myself. The tallest menhir is plastered with lichens of varying colours – lime green, mustard, black – and pockmarked with penny-sized indentations that hint at its age.
The stream of consciousness of ‘The White People’ continues in the same vein as the girl progresses through her mythic hilltop world, before descending into a secret wood where she glimpses something ‘so wonderful and so strange’; we learn only later, in the clumsy framing epilogue, what this cryptic thing is. The girl goes on to recount the dark fairy tales her nurse used to tell her, as well as stories handed down from the nurse’s great-grandmother, who lived alone in a cottage on a hill. Some of the witchcraft-like rituals the old woman used to partake in, and the archaic secrets she knew of – like how to create the power-imbued figure of a clay man, or of the archaic maze game of ‘Troy Town’ – are passed on to the girl, who at the story’s end, more than two years after her nurse has unaccountably gone away, returns to the pool in the wood.
I love ‘The White People’, partly, I think, because of its sheer elusiveness. I still don’t know what exactly is taking place – and it’s better for that. As to whether Machen actually wants us to believe the girl is privy to real forces of witchcraft and fairy other worlds, or whether the story is more of a pa
rable about the loss of innocence, I’m not sure. (It could, of course, be both.) What isn’t in doubt, however, is the peculiar, lingering impression ‘The White People’ leaves.
All these are most secret secrets, and I am glad when I remember what they are, and how many wonderful languages I know, but there are some things that I call the secrets of the secrets that I dare not think of unless I am quite alone, and then I shut my eyes, and put my hands over them and whisper the word …
They lied.
She hadn’t won.
My mother’s tumour had not been completely cut out, despite that second visit to the Pilgrim, and the targeted sci-fi radiation, which did not have the desired effect. The secret word had not been defeated. Instead, over time, it re-emerged and mutated. Metastasised. Like the spreading phosphorescent speck at the end The House on the Borderland, or the creeping spot of fungus from ‘The Voice in the Night’.
I cannot produce an exact mental map of when and where the all-clear became unclear, the distance is too long. But I remember Dad taking me aside, telling me Mum’s illness had come back, and that she was going to have more treatment. This time chemotherapy in some form was involved, and steroids, which left her face bloated and caused her to put on weight. I know I didn’t want my friends to come round and see her like that. Because I didn’t want them to be callous, didn’t want other people to know my mother was unwell. So, I said nothing.
I was a master of secrecy.
Perhaps it was a kind of denial – a magical thinking that by not giving the illness mention, it would be kept at bay – though I think it was more me being protective: she was my mum and I didn’t want anyone else gossiping about her, or offering up false platitudes. It was us against the world.
Me against the world. And fuck all those others wanting to stick their noses in.
There were definite peaks and troughs over the next few years – around three years if my estimations possess any validity. Dark moments when Dad would take me aside and talk about a setback, then more positive episodes when the treatment had seemingly taken effect, when the bad cells were shrinking away. At some point, however, Mum became much more frail. I think her lungs had become involved, making her wheezy; she started carrying an inhaler – your puffer you called it – that she would turn to with increasing regularity. And that was when she got a wheelchair, so if we went shopping I could push her – though she would still scoot out, surprising onlookers, if we reached a high kerb or some similar obstacle.
Then came the secondary tumour in her brain that pushed down onto her optic nerve, causing her to lose the sight in one eye. She wore a patch sometimes when she was out, and didn’t care what people thought – once a little boy asked his own mother why that lady was like a pirate and you could tell the woman was mortified, loud-whispering to him to be quiet, though Mum just laughed and told him it was because her eye was poorly. She was good like that.
You were a ghost pirate, I think.
Later still, the cancer in her brain caused occasional epileptic fits, which were terrifying to witness, and which I hadn’t thought about for years until I started writing this. But she was determined. She would keep battling on, just like my nan had with her arthritis, even though her body was starting to disengage from the world around her.
And she did keep going. Until the sky finally fell away.
Down below me to the south, I see the curve of the Severn Estuary; somewhere to the east will be the border between Wales and England formed by the Wye, though the haze is too far-reaching to make that out, even if the contours of the land were to allow it.
A slant of sunlight angles down from a dark-grey cumulus cloud, like a ray from the heavens drawn in a comic strip.
In a clearing among the Wentwood a white farmhouse glimmers in the vaporous air.
The scene is akin to one in the 1944 Ealing Studios film The Halfway House, a ghostly piece of wartime propaganda (not dissimilar in tone to the previous year’s Thunder Rock) that I first saw aged about ten or eleven. I watched it after returning from Sunday dinner at Nan and Grandad’s – I loved settling down in front of black-and-white afternoon matinees on the telly, sprawled on the sofa knowing that Dad was pottering about outside in the garden. It’s a film that lingered with me long after that initial viewing: it must have had something about it to lodge so firmly inside my head because I didn’t watch it again until a week before I came to the Grey Hill, yet I had retained a vivid sense of its odd ambience.
I’ve always associated the distinctive chimes of the inn’s clock with the near-identical ‘Westminster Quarters’ sounded by the clock in my other aunt and uncle’s front room (they lived in Boston, where that fateful cormorant had alighted – we only visited them a couple of times a year). The doorbell on my current house gives out a simple two-tone chime if somebody rings it, but it has another setting – the full eight-note Westminster Quarters – which can only be activated by fiddling with a tiny switch inside. Something I never do. Very occasionally – as first happened in the early hours of the morning, causing me, illogically and in a state of fright, to search each room for intruders – these troubling tones play of their own accord; I’m almost used to it now, though the sporadic sound causes a wide-eyed, raised-ear look of surprise to appear on my cat’s face, and a slight quickening of my heart. I guess it must be the result of some random radio-wave interference, but it is odd that the standard chime never plays for these phantom rings, nor the other unselected sound the doorbell is capable of playing.
The Halfway House is a low-key production that has an out-of-time quality a world away from modern films. It’s set around the Halfway House of its title, an inn (that has nothing whatsoever to do with the lonely watch-house on Blakeney Point) nestled in a Welsh valley close to the village of Cwmbach. The name translates as ‘Little Valley’, though I suspect it’s chosen here for the play on words of how it sounds in English: ‘Come back’.
The war is in full swing and a disparate group of travellers are making their way to the place for a summer weekend break: the well-known conductor David Davies, returned to his homeland after a long absence, harbouring the secret that he has been given only a few months to live; a couple in the process of splitting up, though their daughter (the young actress Sally Ann Howes from Dead of Night) is doing her best to prevent it; an Irish diplomat keen to defend his country’s neutrality, despite the rift this causes with his English fiancée; a gruff Merchant Navy sea captain and his French wife, both struggling to come to terms with the loss of their son; and an ex-con army man and his black-marketeer friend – they scan the scene from the hillside with their binoculars as they approach, the inn shimmering into view where an instant before the valley was empty. All the guests are attended to by the innkeeper Rhys – played by Mervyn Johns, who also features as the figure haunted by a recurring, nightmarish sense of déjà vu in the central framing device that so effectively links together the disparate stories of Dead of Night – and his daughter Gwyneth, Johns’ real-life daughter Glynis. From early on we realise there is something odd about this pair – Rhys seems to materialise out of the air when he first appears, neither of them cast a shadow, and both have a good line in portentous dialogue.
‘Quite a lot of people who don’t know where they’re going end up here,’ Rhys says to Fortescue, the disgraced army man, as he waits to check in. ‘You were expected, sir.’
The Halfway House is a quiet film full of poignancy, its beautifully shot scenes adding a magical quality to the proceedings, though the location work was actually carried out on Exmoor – another of our childhood summer holiday destinations – rather than Wales. It’s a film, I think, at least partly about living in the moment, and reminds me a little (although it’s far less flamboyant and smaller in scope) of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, which was to be released at cinemas eighteen months later.
As The Halfway House draws to its conclusion,
we learn that time has flipped back and become frozen in a repeat of the weekend a year before when the inn was bombed and destroyed: Rhys and his daughter are well-meaning shades.
Standing on top of the Grey Hill I feel like one of the guests in the film. Drawn to a place offering a fleeting hope of reconciliation with the ghosts of the past.
* The Piper at the Gates of Dawn also gave the title to Pink Floyd’s psychedelic 1967 debut album, which seems rather apt given that the band’s founder member Syd Barrett could himself be said to have seen Pan after excessive LSD consumption opened the singer’s doors of perception.
† Further details can be found in The London Adventure, Machen’s final autobiographical volume, published in 1924.
‡ Machen’s struggles at the time put me in mind of two unnerving London garret-set stories that deal with the disconcerting loneliness of the writer’s existence: Oliver Onions’ ‘The Beckoning Fair One’ and Robert Aickman’s ‘Meeting Mr Millar’.
§ Perhaps the most notable thing about The Magician today is that it was the first film the future director Michael Powell worked on from start to finish (as a kind of production assistant): he even features in a cameo as a balloon-holding onlooker when Haddo is having his silhouette drawn by a fairground artist.
¶ The debut appearance of The Hill of Dreams in this unlikely periodical is less surprising when you discover Machen’s friend A. E. Waite was the London manager of Horlick’s for most of the first decade of the new century. Waite edited and wrote for the journal, which he filled with stories featuring occult and related themes that interested him, such as mesmerism and hypnotism.
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