SLEEP NO MORE

by L. T. C. Rolt

  SLEEP NO MORE

  TWELVE STORIES OF THE SUPERNATURAL

  L. T. C. Rolt

  SLEEP NO MORE

  ISBN: 9781553102786 (Kindle edition)

  ISBN: 9781553102793 (ePub edition)

  Published by Christopher Roden

  for Ash-Tree Press

  P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

  Canada V0K 1A0

  First electronic edition 2012

  First Ash-Tree Press edition 1996

  First published 1948

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume responsibility for, third-party websites or their content.

  This edition © Ash-Tree Press 2012

  Stories in this edition & ‘The Passing of the Ghost Story’ © Sonia Rolt

  Introduction © Christopher Roden

  ‘L. T. C. Rolt and Two Ghost Stories’ © Hugh Lamb

  Jacket art © Paul Lowe

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, not be circulated in any form of binding other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Produced in Canada

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Christopher Roden

  The Mine

  The Cat Returns

  Bosworth Summit Pound

  New Corner

  Cwm Garon

  A Visitor at Ashcombe

  The Garside Fell Disaster

  World’s End

  Hear Not My Steps

  Agony of Flame

  Hawley Bank Foundry

  Music Hath Charms

  The Shouting

  The House of Vengeance

  The Passing of the Ghost Story

  L. T. C. Rolt and Two Ghost Stories

  by Hugh Lamb

  SLEEP NO MORE

  Author’s Note

  The characters in these stories are entirely fictitious and bear no relation whatsoever to any actual person, living or dead. The settings of certain of the stories are, however, based on actual places, but I would assure any readers who may succeed in identifying them that I do not attribute to such places or to their inhabitants any supernatural of sinister quality.

  Two of the stories, ‘The Cat Returns’ and ‘New Corner’ originally appeared in Mystery Stories, and I have to thank the publishers, Messrs The World’s Work, Ltd., for their kind permission to reproduce them here.

  L.T.C.R.

  Introduction

  THE FIRST HALF of the twentieth century was a golden era viewed in terms of the English ghost story. We may trace the real foundation of that era to the early years of the century, when Montague Rhodes James set the standard by which his successors would be judged. Successors there were: those whose stories, because they exhibited similarities to the style of M. R. James, are often classified as ‘Jamesian’. This classification simplifies matters too much and tends to deny the author credit for his or her own particular talent. However, bearing in mind that some of these successors were friends and associates of James, sharing an academic background and an interest in manuscripts, it is hardly surprising that there should be some similarity in subject matter. Nor should it be overlooked that James utilised several excellent plot devices, which would naturally appeal to anyone attempting to write ghost stories at a later date. There are a limited number of plots available to writers in any genre, and often the best an author can hope is that he or she may be able to bring an exciting new twist to a plot that has been used several times before. Writers like R. H. Malden, A. N. L. Munby, E. G. Swain and Arthur Gray succeeded in doing that (to a great extent). Others, like H. R. Wakefield, succeeded when they ‘borrowed’ plots from James, but also developed their talent to a much greater extent, with the result that their work stands very much on its own, and has its own distinct style.

  Lionel Thomas Caswell Rolt (1910–1974) is one author whose work very clearly displays an individual style. True, there are ‘Jamesian’ touches here and there in his stories, but Rolt’s background and environment were very different from that of the traditional ‘Jamesians’ previously mentioned. Rolt was a historian rather than an academic: not a historian bound up in the study of mediaevalism, but one whose sense of realism pervades his work. In that role he was able to bring the freshness of actuality to his writings about rural and industrial Britain. In Landscape With Canals (1977), the second part of his autobiographical trilogy, he wrote:

  I had always disliked those romanticised books about rural England designed to suppress the ugly truths and to make their readers forget that there had ever been an Industrial Revolution or even any Enclosure Acts, by painting a false picture of a countryside unchanged since the Middle Ages, or certainly since the mid-eighteenth century. In this topographical dream-world such facts of life as factories, housing estates, overhead power lines, railways, or even canals, did not exist. Such books are the literary equivalent of those photographs of olde worlde, picturesque villages taken early on a summer morning before any cars are parked around and from which the wirescape has been carefully touched out. Their writers make much play with the adjective ‘unspoiled’ without pausing to consider its significance, much less to ask themselves who has done the spoiling and why.

  Rolt’s interests are reflected in his writings, and range over subjects which include inland waterways, railways, motoring, topography, philosophy, engineering history and engineers. These are all topics which spill in some form into his ghost stories; topics which bring to those stories the reality of everyday life which is almost absent in the traditional ‘Jamesian’ presentation.

  Tom Rolt was born in Chester in February 1910, and lived in the City until his family moved to the southern marches of Wales on the eve of the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. His new home was an influence easily observed in some of the stories in this volume, but Chester, too, seems to have played an important part in raising the young Rolt’s awareness of the supernatural through its many links with the past. In the early chapters of his first autobiographical volume, Landscape With Machines (1971), he writes of returning to Chester during the Christmas holidays:

  But one recollection stands out in memory above all. It is of walking back to Grey Friars through the snow after a Christmas Eve carol service at the cathedral. Our way took us down Watergate Street. This was a narrow cobbled road flanked by even narrower pavements and shadowed by the over-sailing timbered gables of the houses. Because both street and pavements were thickly carpeted by new-fallen snow, we climbed the stone steps to the shelter of the row. Unlike the more frequented rows with their gay shop fronts, Watergate Row was a dim, mysterious place after dark, lit only by infrequent flickering gas lamps. It was inhabited—as it doubtless had been since the Middle Ages—by small craftsmen, coopers, tinsmiths and the like. The windows of their workshops were shuttered now, though some showed chinks of light and there were sounds of unknown activity within. Occasionally the mouth of a narrow alley, dark as midnight and leading to who knows where, opened up between them. Perhaps it was the tunes of the already familiar carols which I had just heard sung in the candle-lit choir of the cathedral, the anticipations of Christmas and the contrasting whiteness of the snow outside that combined to induce a receptive mood in which my recollection of this dim tunnel of Watergate Row was registered and stored away in some most profound level of conscious memory. I could not
have said why this was so. For a child’s apprehensions spring from some mysterious source—racial memory perhaps—which becomes harder to tap as the years pass. The adult must needs rationalise and formulate what the child grasped intuitively. Attempting to formulate at this distance of time I would say that what I perceived then was an embodiment of the continuing life of an ancient city, labyrinthine, dark, mysterious, yet not sinister but intensely human. I think I was born just in time, for which of our modern cities, I wonder, could make such an impression upon a child?

  Rolt began writing seriously in the 1930s, and his first published work, a letter to the periodical Steam Car Developments and Steam Aviation, appeared in June 1934. It was not, however, until 1944 that his first book, Narrow Boat, was published. Two of his works (Strange Vista, which he regarded as over-ambitious and unpublishable, and High Horse Riderless) had been put to one side. High Horse Riderless had to wait some little while longer before finally appearing in print. Narrow Boat, now regarded as a classic of canal literature, tells the story of the narrow boat Cressy, which was adapted for Rolt and his first wife Angela, and in which they made a journey of some four hundred miles along the network of waterways in the Midlands of England. The book was well received. ‘Mr Rolt can write really well—there is a Borrovian flavour about some of his passages,’ wrote the Field, while the Manchester Guardian’s reviewer commented, ‘An engineer by profession, a humanist and almost a poet by temperament, Mr L. T. C. Rolt has long loved the English canals.’

  Narrow Boat had been published by Eyre & Spottiswoode, but Rolt had moved to the house of George Allen & Unwin by the time High Horse Riderless appeared. The same publisher also handled Green and Silver and Inland Waterways of Britain, but refused to pay the sum asked by the illustrator of Rolt’s next book, Lines of Character. As a result the book was offered to Constable who, writes Rolt, ‘published it with conspicuous lack of success’.

  It was Constable who published Sleep No More in 1948, but not all of the stories were new, and ghost stories were certainly not a new idea to Rolt. Writing of late-1936/early-1937 in Landscape With Machines, he says of his need to earn money by his writing:

  I tried my ’prentice hand by writing three ghost stories, ‘The Mine’, ‘The Cat Returns’, and ‘New Corner’. The first was based on recollections of a bygone visit to the Snailbeach lead mining district of Shropshire, the second was purely imaginary while ‘New Corner’ was a motoring variant on the theme of H. R. Wakefield’s golfing ghost story ‘The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster’. It was based on Prescott Hill where, by coincidence, a new corner was actually built many years later as described in the story, though happily not with any such dire results. I sent these three tales to a pulp magazine called Mystery Stories whose editor rejected the first but accepted the other two, much to my surprise and pleasure.

  Rolt’s statement and his Author’s Note in Sleep No More pose something of a mystery. The Supernatural Index (1995) tells us that ‘New Corner’ was published in Mystery Stories 20 (1939), but has no mention of ‘The Cat Returns’. The Supernatural Index does, however, record that ‘The Mine’ was published in Mystery Stories 25 (1942). Could it be that Rolt’s memory was at fault here? It has to be said that ‘The Mine’ is a far better story, and it is difficult to accept that any editor would reject it in favour of ‘The Cat Returns’.

  The first edition of Sleep No More is a compact little volume bound in blue cloth with black lettering on the spine. The dust jacket carries a somewhat uninspiring illustration by Joanna Dowling (who also illustrated the dust jacket for A. N. L. Munby’s The Alabaster Hand in the following year) for ‘The Garside Fell Disaster’. Sleep No More received a rapturous reception from Michael Sadleir of Constable. Rolt writes:

  Michael Sadleir’s reception of this modest collection of stories was so extravagant that it went quite to my head. He hailed me as the successor to M. R. James, whose Ghost Stories of an Antiquary I first read at the age of eight and at five-yearly intervals ever since. He further insisted that we find an illustrator for Sleep No More of the calibre of the artist who was responsible for so splendidly illustrating James’s first collection of stories before his untimely death. Somehow, I cannot now remember in what way, a young artist named Joanna Dowling was discovered and proceeded to produce some really excellent illustrations for my stories. Poor Joanna, she looked upon this commission as her big break-through, yet for some reason that was never really clear to me, Constable, having commissioned her, decided in the end to use only one of her pictures, and that the least satisfactory, as a jacket illustration. It was a slim mouse of a book that eventually appeared in 1950 [sic], a book whose inferior paper soon yellowed. It was never reprinted although some of the stories were subsequently anthologised and others read over the radio.

  Whether Rolt’s comments regarding the lost illustrations are hyperbole it is impossible to say. Certainly, the jacket illustration is weak and does little for the appearance of the original volume. Mrs Sonia Rolt has commented that she recalls seeing an illustration for the story ‘Music Hath Charms’, but all efforts to trace this, or any of the other illustrations, have so far been unsuccessful.

  Michael Sadleir may have claimed too much for Rolt: it would take a great deal to be the true successor to M. R. James. But Rolt at his very best—‘The Mine’, ‘Cwm Garon’, ‘Hawley Bank Foundry’, ‘New Corner’, and ‘The House of Vengeance’—comes close to the singular cleverness of James in telling a ghost story. However one views Rolt’s ability in the genre, Sadleir’s claims would have done no harm at all to his growing reputation, and Sadleir was certainly a more astute critic than was E. F. Bleiler, who wrote in The Guide to Supernatural Fiction (The Kent State Univ. Press, 1983) that the stories were ‘unremarkable’.

  In his article ‘The Passing of the Ghost Story’ (The Saturday Book, No.16 (1956)), which is reproduced in this volume, Rolt wrote:

  One reviewer of this recent book [The Third Ghost Book] maintained that the ghost story had no future because the number of possible plots was limited, that they had been worn out by over-use and were not in any case applicable or convincing in this materialistic atomic age. That the basic plots are limited I agree, but that they are stale or inapplicable to the present day I most stoutly deny. On the contrary, never was a world so full of sinister possibilities.

  In Sleep No More, Rolt supports his view very effectively by using a range of up-to-date situations in settings with which we can all identify.

  ‘The Mine’ visits the old lead-mining district of Snailbeach, set on the slopes of the Stiperstones in Shropshire. This is a wild and haunting area even when seen on a warm summer’s day, an area in which myths abound. The Stipertsones is a long ridge scattered with craggy masses, most notably the Devil’s Chair, which, like other outcrops with a similar name, was reputedly formed when the Devil dropped rocks from a load he was carrying. The range features as Diafol Mountain in Mary Webb’s first novel The Golden Arrow, and she describes with great accuracy and insight the appearance of the Devil’s Chair:

  On the highest point of the bare opposite ridge now curtained in driving storm-cloud, towered in gigantic aloofness a mass of quartzite, blackened and hardened by uncountable ages. In the plain this pile of rock and the rise on which it stood above the rest of the hill-tops would have constituted a hill in itself. The scattered rocks, the ragged holly-brakes on the lower slopes were like carved lions beside the black marble steps of a stupendous throne. Nothing ever altered its look. Dawn quickened over it in pearl and emerald; summer sent the armies of heather to its very foot; snow rested there as doves nest in cliffs. It remained inviolable, taciturn, evil. It glowered darkly on the dawn; it came through the snow like jagged bones through flesh; before its hardness even the venturesome cranberries were discouraged. For miles around, in the plains, the valleys, the mountain dwellings, it was feared. It drew the thunder, people said. Storms broke round it suddenly out of a clear sky; it seemed almost as if it created storm. No on
e cared to cross the range near it after dark—when the black grouse laughed and the cry of a passing curlew shivered like broken glass. The sheep that inhabited these hills would, so the shepherds said, cluster suddenly and stampede for no reason, if they had grazed too near it in the night.

  Old lead-mining operations are still very much in evidence on the slopes of the Stiperstones, especially at Crowsnest and at Snail’s Beach where great grey heaps of slag glimmer like ghosts. (‘Beach’ is a derivation or corruption of ‘batch’, meaning an open space or ground situated near a river.) Rolt’s setting for ‘The Mine’ is perfect, and the understatement of the closing paragraphs is a masterpiece of horror.

  In ‘Bosworth Summit Pound’, Rolt draws on his wide experience of Britain’s canals to produce the eeriest of settings for a ghost story. The actual location, Husbands Bosworth, seems to have conjured up a far deeper impression on Rolt than would be understood from the brief description in Narrow Boat:

  Our first night out of Norton was spent in a disused wharf near Yelvertoft village, and the second in a wooded cutting near the mouth of the tunnel at the delightfully named Husbands Bosworth. . . . It was still raining when we cast off next morning and entered Husbands Bosworth Tunnel, but by the time we reached daylight once more the sky was clearing, and before long the sun came out. . . .

  ‘Cwm Garon’, like ‘The House of Vengeance’, shows the influence of Francis Kilvert, the diarist, the Silurist Henry Vaughan, and his contemporary Thomas Traherne upon Rolt. He first came across Kilvert’s Diary as a boy living in the Hay-on-Wye area. In Landscape With Machines he writes: