Ghostland

by Edward Parnell

  Fred was the last of the family left standing.

  The popularity of the writings of E. F. Benson has also outlived those of his brothers. He achieved instant success in 1893 with his first book, Dodo, a novel that satirised the frivolities of upper-class society and whose title character was a woman based on Margot Tennant, the future wife of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and mother of the film director Anthony Asquith. Like the rest of his family, Fred moved in smart circles. For instance, he knew Oscar Wilde, having most probably been introduced by his King’s compatriot Robbie Ross (Wilde’s lover and, later, the Irishman’s literary executor), and attended the opening night of Lady Windermere’s Fan with the novelist Max Beerbohm.***

  After Dodo, the other big success in E. F. Benson’s prolific career came between the wars with the Mapp and Lucia books, the works for which he is now best remembered. They feature two snobbish, well-to-do women and their comedic social rivalry and petty squabbles. Four of the novels are set around Tilling, a version of Rye in Sussex, the town where for many years Fred resided. He purchased and lived at Lamb House, the former home of Henry James, a family friend to whom his mother had sent an early handwritten draft of Dodo for feedback; the American was unimpressed (‘He wrote me two or three long and kindly and brilliantly evasive letters about it’). Years before, at Addington Palace, the rural mansion near Croydon that came, in addition to Lambeth Palace, with the role of archbishop, Edward White Benson had shared with James ‘the few meagre elements of a small & gruesome spectral story that had been told him years before’ – the tale of an old country house, complete with ‘some dead servants & some children’, that provided the inspiration for The Turn of the Screw. The Tudor manor was Hinton Ampner in Hampshire, though the National Trust property that stands there today is a later reiteration and not the structure so troubled by poltergeists around the year 1771 that it was subsequently demolished.

  Given that while at Cambridge E. F. Benson was a member of the Chitchat Society – he was present on the momentous evening of 28 October 1893 when M. R. James read aloud his first two ghost stories (‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ and ‘Lost Hearts’) – and that the family was associated with Henry James, it’s little surprise that Fred took to writing his own unsettling stories. Early efforts appeared in periodicals such as The Illustrated London News, Hutchinson’s Magazine and Pall Mall Magazine; the latter contained ‘The Bus-Conductor’, a tale with a chilling premonition that formed the basis for the opening filmic episode of Dead of Night (‘Just room for one inside, sir’).

  E. F. Benson’s first book of supernatural stories, The Room in the Tower, was published in 1912. Its title piece is one of his most anthologised and features the vampiric, portrait-dwelling Mrs Stone. The actor Christopher Lee was a pupil at Wellington College when Benson visited his father’s old school and read to an assembled hall of boys: Lee found ‘The Room in the Tower’ the ‘most vivid’ of the tales that Benson delivered to the rapt audience in his quiet voice, perhaps drawing on its atmosphere for his own later Hammer Horror depictions of the blood-sucking Count. In 1923 came Visible and Invisible, then Spook Stories in 1928, with Benson’s last dedicated ghostly collection, More Spook Stories, in 1934. This contains my favourite of his tales, an atypically wistful, autobiographical work titled ‘Pirates’ that takes place at ‘Lescop’, a barely disguised version of his childhood family home in Truro.

  The set-up of the story is not dissimilar to ‘Negotium Perambulans’. Fifty-six-year-old Peter Graham, a successful businessman, is the chairman of a company that owns a number of dormant Cornish tin mines which, with the aid of a new, cheaper chemical process, have been deemed viable again. Peter, a hands-on chap, has come down to Cornwall to assess the properties and decides to stop off at Truro to take a look, forty years since he last saw it, at his old house. Conveniently, Lescop has been unoccupied for some time and the local estate agent entrusts him the keys and tells him to inspect the place at his leisure.

  Arriving at Lis Escop I’m not sure what to expect, though I’ve seen photographs of the exterior, so its architecture isn’t a surprise. It’s a grand building, dating originally from 1780, but extensively remodelled and added to thereafter; today it is known as Epiphany House, an ecumenical Christian conference centre and retreat. The manager, Janette, greets me and shows me around – pointing out the numerous changes since the Bensons arrived here in 1877 for their residence of a little over five years: here, Janette speculates, would have been Minnie’s sitting room, here’s the bishop’s study. But, with the much-changed layout, it’s not easy to picture the space described so vividly in Benson’s story. The attic floor, for example, where, if the geography of ‘Pirates’ is to be believed (and I see no reason why not), Peter Graham, and therefore by extension Fred Benson, had his bedroom, is currently in a state of disrepair and not accessible. I content myself with peering out of the leaded window at the top of the curving staircase, perhaps the spot where the returned Peter remembers looking over the lawn as a boy, watching the clumsy antics of wood pigeons in the neighbouring tree – though there’s no ‘drooping lime’ there now.

  In 1953 the bishop of Cornwall’s residence was relocated within the grounds of Trelissick House, a six-mile drive away. For three decades, until its financial failure, Lis Escop became part of Truro Cathedral School. The extensive gardens were parcelled up and sold, the house being purchased in 1983 to be used as a convent. The nuns were of a small, aged order and, when just two of them were left, gifted the place to set up the charitable trust now in operation; the last of the sisters, who was being looked after and living out her days at Lis Escop, passed away, Janette tells me, a couple of weeks before my visit.

  ‘It’s the end of an era,’ she says.

  On his return, Peter finds the house’s emptiness and dilapidation rather mournful. He’s pleased to be outside where he can familiarise himself, after such a long absence, with the extensive grounds he so loved to play in, where he used to search for birds’ nests and moths. Like me, Fred Benson was a keen naturalist as a boy, an interest he kept for the rest of his life. He described his own lawn at Lamb House as ‘bird-haunted’ and writes beautifully about the ventriloquial starlings that he would feed bacon rind to, one of which would imitate a redshank as it perched on the garden trellis. Away from Rye, on numerous occasions he enjoyed birdwatching holidays to the north Norfolk coast, usually to Cley and Blakeney – hence how he came upon the isolated Halfway House on Blakeney Point, which provided him the inspiration for ‘A Tale of an Empty House’. In Final Edition, the volume of autobiography completed just ten days before his death, he describes trips around those same marshes and reedbeds, detailing the ‘sea swallows’ (terns), bearded tits, the then rare avocet, and the ‘three tall spoonbills standing aloof and meditative’ that remained indelible in his memory. (My first spoonbill was also on the flooded scrapes at Cley, a typically immobile individual of this heron-like species.)†††

  Peter’s initial euphoria at being within Lescop’s gardens soon turns to despondency, as he realises how ‘utterly neglected’ they have become. However, his spirits are raised when he notices a familiar structure among the briars and thickets, which takes him back to a childhood game he used to play with his siblings: the ‘Pirates’ of the story’s title. Pirates was a real game the Benson children invented in the grounds of Lis Escop. Its rules were somewhat involved but, basically, two participants hid in the garden’s thick cover and maze of pathways, while the other three (though occasionally their mother joined in and, just once, the bishop) ‘set forth at the order of the Admiral to pick a trophy without being caught by the Pirates’. They had to reach ‘Plymouth Sound’, the summer house at the top of the garden. As Peter comes once more to this place – its ‘roof collapsed and its walls bulging’ – he thinks he hears one of his sisters calling out to him; earlier, walking up from Truro, he experienced vivid flashbacks of fellow Grahams, frozen in a time-shifted moment.
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  The last of these – the family on their way to a birthday outing together – puts me in mind of one of the most unsettling incidents of the New England author Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House – perhaps the ultimate haunted dwelling in fiction, and the one book I read while researching Ghostland that caused me to feel nervous about switching off my bedside light. During a night-time argument, Eleanor and Theodora, the two young women brought along to help test whether Hill House is haunted, happen upon a menacing, spectrally lit picnic in the grounds of that ‘maniac juxtaposition’ of a place. Eleanor’s dead mother is there, picking at a plate of fruit, causing Theodore to scream. ‘Don’t look back,’ she cries out in fear, ‘don’t look back – don’t look – run!’

  Nothing so dramatic happens to Peter, who heads away without incident and drops off the keys at the office in town. Chatting to the man there it transpires that Lescop’s previous tenants have never stayed for long; there are stories of the place being troubled, and it’s available very cheaply: ‘It was just because it was haunted that he longed for it, and the more savagely and sensibly he assured himself of the folly of possessing it, the more he yearned after it, and constantly now it coloured his dreams.’

  Back in London, a newly acquired heart condition – and the subsequent warning from his doctor that if he doesn’t take things easier he’ll soon be dead – spurs Peter to action, and Lescop is inevitably purchased. The old furniture he’s clung onto from the house is repatriated, repairs carried out, and rooms decorated as he remembers them from before. His own fondly recalled bedroom is restored in the attic, but there are strict instructions that no work should be started on the garden – Peter will direct that project after he takes up residence. He moves in, but, disappointingly, hears no more voices or whispers.

  They’re here though, he thinks to himself.

  Having finished my tour with Janette I wander along the lane to Kenwyn Church, skirting what’s left of the gardens (much has been turned over to new housing, or is awaiting development). There’s still a dense, overgrown area to the rear of Lis Escop, however, where bamboo grows tall, where pirates could easily be hiding in ambush. Two goldcrests call from deep within a yew tree. In the story, one of the gardeners, the son of the cowman from forty years before – in the Bensons’ time there was a cattle meadow at the side of the house – can recall the vast array of guinea pigs that Sybil would once have kept in their hutches somewhere out here, a clear reference to the pets E. F. Benson’s troubled sister Maggie doted on.

  After three weeks the work overseen by Peter has been carried out and the grounds returned to an approximation of their original condition. The house’s owner is giddy, unable to take his now usual siesta in the restored summer house – ‘Plymouth Sound’ – because he can’t stop himself from pacing the newly cleared pathways in an excited state of agitation. A tightness pulls across his chest and he retreats inside for an early night. Yet he wakes suddenly:

  The room was curiously bright, but not with the quality of moonlight; it was like a valley lying in shadow, while somewhere, a little way above it, shone some strong splendour of moon. And then he heard again his name called, and he knew that the sound of the voice came in through the window. There was no doubt that Violet was calling him: she and the others were out in the garden.

  He follows their familiar noise, down to where they are waiting at the summer house, passing his mother who now is sitting in her room on her bed, saying to him how lovely it is, Peter, to have you home. (I don’t think there’s any malice in this ending, and yet, I find I cannot be absolutely certain …)

  His body is discovered on the gravel the next morning.

  As to my own somewhat less grand childhood dwelling (c. 1960, rather than 1780) – the only house I had lived in until I went to university – it’s still there. From the outside it doesn’t appear very different, though the car port is covered by a garage door now and all the wooden windows have been replaced with uPVC ones. I thought hard about attempting to look inside again. About asking the current owner – the same man we sold it to two decades ago – whether he would show me around, but I realised that even if he agreed to my odd request I wouldn’t want to see the place transformed into someone else’s home. I want to keep its memory – its ghosts – to myself, not have it sullied by someone else’s casual small talk. Still, I can’t resist an occasional drive-by when I’m passing – but with the death of my elderly aunt and uncle (who’d continued to live in the town) during the writing of this book, the incentive for those already infrequent Lincolnshire visits is reduced further.

  The last time, I dawdled in my car on the street out front before parking in the cul-de-sac around the corner – the way I walked each day to my primary school. On the grass by the old people’s bungalows a green woodpecker is feeding – a bird that was near-mythical when I was young, as I’d never seen one locally, let alone right next to home. Buoyed by that, I follow the footpath along the route of the former railway line that ran past the back of the house, now lined with flimsy-looking flats where the bread factory my brother was working in when he got his Hodgkin’s diagnosis used to stand. I peek over the fence at the rear end of the garden. The horse chestnut Dad planted to mark Chris’s first birthday towers upwards, though most of the other flowers, trees and shrubs he spent his Sunday afternoons toiling over, while I sat inside watching strange old films like The Halfway House, seem to have been removed.

  Will ‘Babes in the Wood’ sound in the distance, I half wonder. Will my mother be sitting at a picnic on the grass, like the family party outside Hill House or the one Peter Graham glimpses as he retraces his childhood steps? Somewhere behind the house’s walls, might my parents’ shades – like the ethereal, lingering trace of the couple in Virginia Woolf’s tender two-page story ‘A Haunted House’ – be prolonging the ‘hidden joy’ of their relationship?

  Nothing stirs, except the branches of the conker tree; silence lies steadily on the lawn.

  It’s not the house that is haunted. It’s me.

  And I want to be; I have to be. Because if I give them up – if I stop looking back – everything that ever happened to us will cease to exist.

  * It would be easier to ascribe a supernatural origin to the music I came home to if R. Dean Taylor’s ‘There’s a Ghost in my House’ had been playing – particularly as we didn’t own the track on CD. My older, Northern Soul-loving cousin had introduced me to this slice of Tamla Motown when I was six, knowing the slightest suggestion of a ghost would be a siren song to me.

  † I was to encounter a lesser yellowlegs again on my latest visit, nearly thirty years on from the first, feeding elegantly among the mud of a Du Maurier-esque creek near Truro – a far more picturesque backdrop than the flooded field next to a petrol station in which that earlier bird had settled.

  ‡ The Cornish mining industry sits at the heart of one of my favourite Hammer films, The Plague of the Zombies. It features a striking scene in which the undead, who are being used by the local Victorian squire as slave labour in his mine, claw their way up through the soil of the village churchyard. Its actors never came near Cornwall, however; the film was shot at Bray Studios and in the surrounding woods and heaths of the Home Counties. Levant and Botallack did, though, provide an authentic backdrop to the atmospheric Children’s Film and Television Foundation production, Haunters of the Deep.

  § Quite unexpectedly, in 2001 a pioneering party of these glossy-black crows arrived across the water from Ireland; today small flocks can be seen around the Land’s End peninsula and the Lizard.

  ¶ The words were written after Berlin had left Cornwall (in September 1953) for a punishing two-month Romany caravan journey to the New Forest. He pitched up, a little like all those doomed Victorian seekers of Utopia, at Minstead, close to where Arthur Conan Doyle was to be re-interred.

  ** Eventually Colquhoun rejects the Rosemerryn studio not because of its ghosts, but for more p
ractical reasons: the owners use it as a lounge area each evening, meaning she would have to clear away her painting materials at the end of every day.

  †† ‘The Swords’, which contains one of the most casually disturbing scenes I’ve ever read, is from Aickman’s 1975 collection Cold Hand in Mine – by which time the former chief of the Inland Waterways Association had honed his enigmatic style to near-perfection.

  ‡‡ Or like the mob of Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 violent Cornwall-set thriller Straw Dogs, which was filmed just a few miles away, around the village of St Buryan.

  §§ Maggie’s physician, Dr George Stevens, had earlier treated Virginia Woolf’s breakdown following the death of her father.

  ¶¶ On Christmas Day 1882 Edward Benson had been offered, and accepted, the position of archbishop of Canterbury – a promotion that led to the family leaving Truro. Monty James (during the holidays at the end of his first term at King’s) happened to be visiting Arthur at Lis Escop when the offer of the archbishopric came through.

  *** E. F. Benson’s personal favourite of his own supernatural tales was ‘How Fear Departed the Long Gallery’, a comic but at times still frightening piece that reminds me of Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’.