Ghostland

by Edward Parnell

  Born in 1906 in India’s Assam region, the daughter of a British civil servant, Ithell Colquhoun was educated back in England at Cheltenham Art School and the Slade (where M. R. James’s friend and illustrator James McBryde retrained after passing up on a career in medicine). Afterwards, she went to Europe, encountering André Breton and her future husband Toni del Renzio; after their acrimonious divorce in 1947, she turned from Surrealism and devoted increasing amounts of time to her interest in the spiritual and occult. Her first book, 1955’s The Crying of the Wind, is an offbeat account of her travels around Ireland, and was followed two years later by the equally hard-to-classify The Living Stones. It’s about her quest for a rural Eden away from the modern world, and about the ancient megaliths, folklore and customs that pepper this cul-de-sac of land. Even then, however, in the mid-1950s, she bemoans the growing number of cars coming to the valley – I’d hate to think what she would make of it nowadays in summer.

  Photo (Ithell Colquhoun) Reg Speller/Stringer via Getty Images

  Lamorna becomes almost a character in its own right in The Living Stones, along with the ramshackle Vow Cave – sited alongside the sometimes trickling, sometimes torrential stream – that was Colquhoun’s one-room studio and home in those post-war years (it was rebuilt in the 1990s using Cornish granite rather than the corrugated iron of her time). Her 1955 oil painting Landscape with Antiquities, Lamorna acts as a kind of stylised treasure map of the menhirs and stone circles of the area, showing the Merry Maidens and the Pipers, found just off the road between Lamorna and St Buryan. Early on in the book she discusses the bird life of the valley but, perhaps predictably, my favourite chapter is titled ‘Lamorna Shades’. Here Colquhoun tells of the potential studio (which I believe must have been attached to Rosemerryn House, the former home of the mysteriously drowned Cornish writer, Crosbie Garstin) she considered taking before discovering her ‘mouldy little place’ at Vow Cave. The American owners warned her that it contained ‘spooks’, which, although prone to walk noisily around the attic, were ‘perfectly harmless’. She wonders whether they’re quite as benign as the owners suggest, given the house’s reputation for tragedy and strange happenings.** These include an apparently haunted mirror that could be straight out of the film Dead of Night: ‘a lady looking into her mirror one day was horrified to see not the expected reflection of herself and her furniture but a mist forming within the “many dimensions” of the looking-glass and becoming denser every second.’

  To add to the place’s aura, in the grounds of Rosemerryn sits the sunken Boleigh fogou, an underground, man-made Iron Age chamber stretching about forty feet in length, which it’s speculated was used for ritual or ceremonial purposes. In the local legend of ‘Duffy and the Devil’ – a reworking of Rumpelstiltskin in which the Devil’s unlikely name turns out to be ‘Terrytop’ – the fogou (from the Cornish word for cave) is the place where the neighbourhood coven summon their master; in real life, it was said to have been a Royalist hideout during the Civil War. This location is just one example of the charged nature of the valley – seemingly every other house has its rumoured resident shade. And, to Colquhoun, the woods themselves have their own unquiet guardian elemental spirits: ‘Others think that the melancholy of Lamorna goes further back than can be imagined: some trouble of the rocks before humanity began may still impinge upon the vitality of the trees.’

  Later in The Living Stones Colquhoun ventures further afield, away from West Penwith. She travels to various localities around the county including the annual May fair in Helston. There she watches a Spaniard called Alonso stick blades through an ‘up-ended coffin’ in which his assistant – a young woman resembling the girl in Robert Aickman’s ‘The Swords’ – is entombed.†† At the fair Colquhoun also comes upon a strange, sad sideshow featuring ‘The Cornish Pixie’: ‘He looked rather like a leprechaun or goblin. His whole face had a certain pathetic beauty; his mouth was thin, and there was a tear at the corner of one his blue eyes.’

  Colquhoun goes on to visit Padstow’s own celebrated rite of spring with its famous Hobby Horse, known thereabouts as the ’Obba ’Oss: ‘This, I thought, is the image of a demon or of some creature used in sympathetic magic to exorcise demons.’ Robin Hardy, the director of The Wicker Man, had also stumbled upon Padstow’s festive parade while filming in Cornwall in the sixties. The experience, which he found rather sinister, stayed with him and became part of Summerisle’s own May Day festivities at the climax of the film: ‘We saw the Hobbyhorse chasing the girls, everything. But they had seemed to put up a wall of evasion about it. And it was very unpleasant being a stranger in the town that day.’

  These traditional Cornish rituals and gatherings bring to mind two of the books in Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series, both set around the fictional fishing port of Trewissick, a version of the Mevagissey that Cooper had been brought to on holidays in her youth – at a parallel date to when Colquhoun was painting further down the coast. On my visit a flock of turnstones, busy brown-and-white wading birds that were a favourite of my father, are perched like carved wooden decorations – for once not scampering about the quayside like wind-up toys – on the gunwale of a rowing boat moored on the sheltered waters of the harbour.

  Pleasant as the village is, I find it hard to square with the quiet little place Cooper holidayed at in her youth – though I do my best to conjure several of the gabled houses located on the narrow streets that twist up the hillside into the Grey House, where the Drew children’s adventures with the wizard Merriman begin in Over Sea, Under Stone. In the novel Trewissick has its own summer carnival, complete with a costume parade and traditional dancing reminiscent of the fair at Helston that Colquhoun visited.

  Greenwitch, the third in Cooper’s sequence, is a darker book, replete with a dreamlike mood and striking pagan imagery. At its centre is the titular Greenwitch, a foliage statue made afresh by the women of the town each year to be given as an offering to the sea. It’s an evocative and complicated creation that brings to mind the votive structure at the finale of The Wicker Man:

  ‘Hazel for the framework,’ the woman said. ‘Rowan for the head. Then the body is of hawthorn boughs, and hawthorn blossoms. With the stones within, for the sinking. And those who are crossed, or barren, or who would make any wish, must touch the Greenwitch then before she be put to cliff.’

  This is the novel in which Jane Drew emerges as a strong character in her own right, rivalling Will Stanton, the hero of The Dark is Rising, who appears for the first time here in tandem with the Drew children (all of them are also reunited in the last of the series, Silver on the Tree). Jane forges a kind of kinship with the Greenwitch, which is itself possessed of a complicated, angry life force that’s disarmed by Jane’s empathy and unleashes the Wild Magic of the town’s haunted, burning past to defeat the darkness that, in Cooper’s universe, is always waiting.

  Lamorna wasn’t somewhere that my brother and I tended to frequent as we went about trying to find lost migrants on our visits: all those trees and thick cover make birding there hard going. We concentrated our efforts on the valleys even closer to Land’s End and St Just: Nanquidno, the Cot, Kenidjack, St Levan and Porthgwarra. These last two hamlets are tucked away to the west of Porthcurno, a village at the heart of Britain’s early telegraphic communications industry – at one point fourteen submarine cables came in here from the Atlantic and connected the country to the rest of the globe. Later, until the closure of its engineering college in 1993, it became a hub for the training of telecommunications staff from around the world. This, coupled with the iconic open-air Minack Theatre that’s hewn out of the very stones of the cliffs – a one-woman vision and feat of construction begun, in 1932, by the remarkable Rowena Cade – gives the place a somewhat surreal atmosphere. Fittingly, the opening theatrical performance in this most storm-lashed of backdrops was The Tempest.

  The approach to neighbouring Porthgwarra, a high-hedged minor road that passes through sev
eral farms but little else on its snaking path down to the sea, reminds me of the fictional village in E. F. Benson’s short story ‘Negotium Perambulans’: Polearn, a similarly sited place between Land’s End and Penzance. The tiny, cut-off settlement is noted in guidebooks, Benson tells us, only for the interesting carved wooden panels in its church. Even the postman in Benson’s 1922 tale doesn’t bother to go all the way down the hill, dropping off and collecting his letters from a box beside the track above the village, while the fishermen take their catch by sea round to Penzance, rather than use the circuitous landward route. ‘But they are linked together, so it has always seemed to me, by some mysterious comprehension: it is as if they had all been initiated into some ancient rite, inspired and framed by forces visible and invisible.’

  And so Benson introduces us to an archetypal isolated and insular community, setting up readers to believe there will be dark secrets and, no doubt, strange, hostile locals. We fully anticipate that the villagers will reveal themselves as a corrupted, inbred lot like those we find populating H. P. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth and Dunwich.‡‡ Yet, in contrast to our expectations, here in Benson’s Polearn the village’s inhabitants are decent, God-fearing folk. Certainly the story’s narrator reckons so, remembering back with fondness to his childhood, when he was exiled here at the age of ten to stay with his aunt and uncle, Polearn’s vicar, in order that the fresh sea air should cure him of a lung problem. Outdoor life – long days spent wandering the clifftops and playing with the local boys – turns him into a strapping lad when, at thirteen, after three happy years, he goes off to Eton and then Cambridge, and then into the wider world to pursue a lucrative law career.

  Although the narrator’s childhood stay was largely serene, Sundays were less so, as then, along with the rest of the village, he had to sit through his otherwise mild uncle’s fire-and-brimstone sermons, delivered before those altar-rail panels mentioned by the guidebook, the last of which depicts Polearn’s own churchyard and lychgate: ‘In the entry stood the figure of a robed priest holding up a Cross, with which he faced a terrible creature like a gigantic slug, that reared itself up in front of him.’ Beneath the carving is a Latin line from the ninety-first Psalm, which gives the story its title: ‘Negotium perambulans in tenebris’, roughly translated as ‘the thing that walks in the darkness’.

  We soon get an idea of what this morbid tableau might refer to, when we learn that a much earlier place of worship stood on the flattened area of ground beneath the quarry. The owner of the land demolished the sacred structure and used the stones to build a house on the site, even co-opting some of the church’s vestigial consecrated elements into everyday usage, such as substituting the altar as a table, which the fellow ate off and played dice on. As he grew older, the man developed a terrible fear of the dark and insisted that candles be kept burning all night. One evening a strong gale (not a rarity in this part of the world, from my experience) caused them to be extinguished, the screams emanating from the man’s blood-streaming throat bringing his servants to an unholy scene in which ‘some huge black shadow seemed to move away from him, crawled across the floor and up the wall and out of the broken window’. For a long time afterwards the dwelling by the quarry, unsurprisingly, was left empty. But during the narrator’s childhood sojourn in the village it once again became occupied, by a man from Penzance. Despite the boy’s initial hopes ‘that it would be intensely exciting to wake at some timeless hour and hear Mr Dooliss yelling, and conjecture that the Thing had got him’, the new owner kept himself uneventfully to himself.

  When the narrator returns to Polearn – after two decades as a barrister he wishes to escape the rat race – he moves in with his aunt (his uncle has by this point died) while he looks for a place of his own. The reclusive Dooliss, he learns, acquired an identical night fear to that of his predecessor, and met his end, several years before, in a similar fashion. However, the unhallowed quarry house has a new resident, though the artist John Evans is almost unrecognisable as the young man the narrator remembers. His artistic (and personal) style has much changed in the intervening period and he now creates dark works that bring to my mind the paintings of the early twentieth-century London artist Austin Osman Spare, a favourite of Aleister Crowley. Like previous inhabitants of the house, Evans too has developed a phobia of the darkness – and of the thing that walks within it. At the conclusion of the story his grisly demise is witnessed by the narrator, the sight of it sending him away from the idyll in which he hoped to see out his days:

  But I had made up my mind that when once I had provided for my own independence, I would go back there not to leave it again. And yet I did leave it again, and now nothing in the world would induce me to turn down the lane from the road that leads from Penzance to the Land’s End, and see the sides of the combe rise steep above the roofs of the village and hear the gulls chiding as they fish in the bay.

  ‘Negotium Perambulans’ is a story rich in atmosphere, with a convincing Cornish setting – though the agency behind the creature that comes out of the night is difficult to discern. Is it a vengeful force sent by God to punish the defilers of the original church and those who come after, or ‘some trouble of the rocks before humanity began’ as Ithell Colquhoun might suggest? Whatever the cause, the details are visceral: ‘there on the floor he lay, no more than a rind of skin in loose folds over projecting bones.’

  This physical repugnance is a feature of many of E. F. Benson’s stories, leading M. R. James – although an admirer of his tales – to note of his long-time acquaintance that ‘to my mind he sins occasionally by stepping over the line of legitimate horridness’. It is a characteristic taken to its extreme in ‘Caterpillars’, in which a plague of horrific claw-footed caterpillars inundate an Italian villa, apparently causing one of the guests to later develop and die from some unspecified cancer. It’s an awful image, with the ‘greyish-yellow’ insects representing the malignancy just as effectively as the crab that ordinarily gives the disease its name: ‘Gradually, like some hideous tide of flesh, they advanced along the passage, and I saw the foremost, visible by the pale grey luminousness that came from them, reach his door.’

  Edward Frederic Benson, known to his family and close acquaintances as Fred, was born in 1867 in Berkshire, where his father Edward White Benson was headmaster of the recently established Wellington College. Fred was the second youngest of six siblings: four boys and two girls. They were a remarkable, gifted and generally tight-knit family – who would go on to move in the highest of circles, including Queen Victoria and William Gladstone, and count themselves friends of Robert Browning and the Tennysons – yet emotional, physical and mental health troubles stalked them all, like the lingering ancestral curse in E. F. Benson’s homoerotic 1930 novel of Cornwall and the Great God Pan, The Inheritor.

  Photo (E. F. Benson) Hulton Archive/Stringer via Getty Images

  The family’s patriarch was a domineering, complex, changeable character, and wed his cousin, who was twelve years his junior, as soon as she was eighteen. Minnie, known later as ‘Ben’ to her close friends, spent the rest of her life falling in love with various women; none of the Benson children married, and all were far more comfortable in the company of members of the same sex. Tragedy struck the family early on too, with the eldest (and Edward White Benson’s favourite) child, Martin, dying of meningitis aged seventeen, and the first of the two daughters, Eleanor Mary (‘Nellie’), from diphtheria, at twenty-seven. Margaret (‘Maggie’) shared Fred’s love of wildlife, and possessed her own menagerie of animals including a goat, canaries, collies and a large collection of guinea pigs. She grew into a brilliant scholar – though she attended Oxford at a time when women were not permitted to hold a degree – later going to Greece and Egypt with Fred, where she gained repute as an archaeologist. These good times were not to last, however, and in 1907, she was admitted to a mental asylum;§§ she died in 1916 from heart failure.

  When Fred was five, the family rel
ocated to Lincoln, his father being appointed chancellor of my home county’s cathedral – that most gothic of buildings, with its underwhelming imp – before they were uprooted again, in 1877, when Edward White Benson was offered the newly created post of bishop of Cornwall. The eight of them moved to the vicarage at Kenwyn, a suburb on the hill above Truro, and work soon began on extending the house, now renamed Lis Escop (‘Bishop’s Palace’ in Cornish), into a residence worthy of the title.

  Half a decade younger than M. R. James, Fred Benson’s formative life ran, in many respects, along parallel lines. He attended Temple Grove prep school in Surrey, as had James, and as had his brother Arthur – a friend of MRJ’s.¶¶ However, Fred failed his scholarship for Eton and ended up as a fee-paying pupil at Marlborough, before following in his older sibling’s steps and taking up a place at King’s, Cambridge in the autumn of 1887. Arthur Christopher, the oldest of the three Benson brothers who reached adulthood, is best known for composing the words to Elgar’s ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, though he was also a successful author, producing a large number of books including editing a ten-volume edition of Queen Victoria’s letters, and two published collections of ghost stories. In addition, he had a career as a house master at Eton before becoming master of Magdalene College, Cambridge – where he continued to be one of James’s closest, albeit most acerbic friends.

  The youngest of the Benson children, Robert Hugh (known as Hugh), also trailed his brothers to Cambridge, afterwards entering the Anglican Church before converting a few years thereafter to Catholicism. This was a scandalous choice for the son of an archbishop – though by this time Edward White Benson was no longer alive to suffer any embarrassment. Hugh was an author too, and wrote a number of supernatural tales, the majority of which make a point of referring to his Catholic faith (James thought them ‘too ecclesiastical’). He died a few months after the start of the Great War from an underlying heart condition and pneumonia, followed a little over a decade later by Arthur.