SLEEP NO MORE

by L. T. C. Rolt

  Kilvert was neither the first nor the last man to be influenced by the powerful magic of this mountain country. I know that in my early boyhood its beauty and wildness was capable of inducing in me a strange feeling of intense exaltation that was part awed reverence and part terror. It could make my spine tingle and the hair on my head stand up. It was from such experiences and not from the teachings of any organised religion that there has stemmed my conviction that there is a God beyond human conceptions of good and evil. The reverse of this medal is that I believe these same experiences to be the source of my lifelong interest in supernatural evil. When, much later in life, I discovered the great mystical writings of the Silurist Henry Vaughan and his contemporary Thomas Traherne, I realised with shock of wonderment that they had been similarly influenced by the same landscape. And when, at about the same time, I read those short stories of Arthur Machen, ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’, ‘The Great God Pan’, ‘The Shining Pyramid’ and ‘The White People’, I knew that he, born at Caerleon, had experienced its darker side. . . . But whereas the ordinary mortal cannot exist for very long on the mystical plane that Vaughan and Traherne inhabit, the great merit of Kilvert’s Diary is that it is a faithful reflection of life itself in its rapid shifts from pathos to bathos, from the sublime to the ridiculous and from prose of visionary quality to homespun detail or country gossip. It is for this reason and also because no other book has the power to evoke such vivid memories of my childhood that his Diary has become one of my favourite bedside books.

  Landscape With Machines also provides a clue as to the location of Cwm Garon:

  . . . And so we came to the lost hamlet of Capel-y-ffyn with its tiny church and Baptist chapel. Here we turned aside to visit the Monastery, scene of that ill-starred attempt by Joesph Leicester Lyne, self-styled ‘Father Ignatius’, to found a community of Anglican Benedictine monks. . . . I thought the Monastery, on the dark side of the valley and surrounded by gloomy pines, a sad, depressing place and was glad when we were rumbling on our way again along the narrow winding lane down the valley.

  This certainly is mysterious country, and the mystery is brought very much to life in both ‘Cwm Garon’ and ‘The House of Vengeance’.

  ‘The Garside Fell Disaster’ once more draws on an actual location—Blea Moor on the Settle-Carlisle railway line—and, in a way, heralds one of Rolt’s later works: Red for Danger (1955), a history of railway accidents and railway safety. In this story Rolt skilfully breathes life into something as inanimate as a railway tunnel.

  Rolt displayed an excellent eye for small detail, too, an attribute never more evident than in his description of Amos Bingley in ‘A Visitor At Ashcombe’:

  His career began at the early age of eight, when he worked as bellows-boy in his father’s back-yard chain forge at Cradley Heath . . . Sentiment, or more probably a folk memory derived from ancestors who combined chain-making with agriculture in days before the Black Country was black . . . It is a strange paradox that after a lifetime spent amid surroundings resembling Dante’s Inferno, this tough old Black Countryman should have met his match in this quiet Cotswold village.

  A modest description, one might think, unless one is familiar with the area of which Rolt writes: how difficult it must be for those who have not viewed from a passing train the typical back-yard chain forge in the blackest parts of the Black Country to understand the picture which is being painted here. The finishing touch to the scene is added by the phrase ‘surroundings resembling Dante’s Inferno’, for it was in conditions like these that small enterprise sweated over small furnaces to eke out a living at a time when Britain could boast industry of which it could be proud. Tom Rolt knew these men. As he wrote in Landscape With Canals, when he was recalling his time investigating the county for his book Worcestershire:

  . . . such was the infinite variety and richness of the Worcestershire characters to whom it introduced me: Squire of Stourbridge making fireclay glass-pots by a method which pre-dated the invention of the potter’s wheel; Weaver of Catshill, last of the Bromsgrove nailmasters, working the oliver in his back-yard nail forge; Birch of Bewdley, last of the Wyre Forest broom-squires making his besoms, whisks and skep baskets; Eddie Moore, the scythe-maker, plating scythe blades under his water-powered tilt hammer in a little forge at Bell End; a remarkable old man named George ‘Aurelius’ Marcuis, last of a long line of Bewdley river men and barge-masters; William Fowkes of Droitwich, silver-haired and soft-voiced, a master furniture maker if ever there was one.

  These were the men Rolt knew, the surroundings he recognised, and these are the characters and surroundings which emerge in his ghost stories. And perhaps the most dramatic climax of all—a climax which could only have been conceived by one familiar with industry, the men who worked in it, and the conditions in which those men worked, occurs in ‘Hawley Bank Foundry’. Set in the Ironbridge Gorge, a centre of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, which today is a living Museum of times past, ‘Hawley Bank Foundry’ conjures up the picture of a true Dante’s Inferno in a climactic scene of stunning power and intensity. One can feel the heat from the furnace as the molten metal is released, smell the sweating bodies of the men gathered round the mould, sense the tenseness of the situation—and experience the horror of that final scene.

  Previous readers of Sleep No More will perhaps wonder about two stories they may not have encountered before: ‘The Shouting’ and ‘The House of Vengeance’. Both of these stories date from a much later period than the original collection, and it is to Hugh Lamb that we owe their original publication (in The Thrill of Horror (1975) and The Taste of Fear (1976) respectively). The stories were first collected together in Two Ghost Stories (1994), and it is only right that they should now appear as part of a collection of the complete supernatural writings of L. T. C. Rolt. It is only right, too, that Hugh Lamb should receive the credit for their appearing at all. Hugh has presented the story behind the stories in an article which first appeared in All Hallows 8, and which, as the final contribution to this volume, completes our knowledge of Tom Rolt’s venture into supernatural fiction.

  Rolt was a crusader, a man who cared passionately for our heritage, a man who was prepared to translate his caring into action, as he more than adequately demonstrated through his work with the Inland Waterways Association and the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society. Far from being happy to pontificate from an armchair, he was one of life’s doers: a man of the world. His experiences and his interests enabled him to present us with a collection of stories which transcends the range of the ghost story as written by a number of ‘Jamesian’ authors, but he could be ‘Jamesian’ too. Let us be satisfied with saying that Rolt’s ghost stories are in the James tradition, but that they differ from the stories of James. Where James’s settings are ecclesiastical, Rolt’s are industrial: James’s cathedrals are Rolt’s foundries. Rolt adds to this by conveying a love and awareness of the environment through a descriptive technique which is often absent from James’s stories—despite James’s apparent liking for travel and the open air, he rarely waxed lyrical about the countryside in his ghost stories. Both authors succeed for the same reason: they write of their own time and of surroundings with which they are familiar. In Rolt’s case that familiarity is with mountains, canals, railway tunnels, mines, foundries, and hill-climbs.

  In some ways it is hard to believe that the many of these stories are over fifty years old. However, when one thinks that the canals, steam railways, mines, and foundries of which Rolt writes are just as much a thing of the past as M. R. James’s antiquarian settings, there dawns the realisation that perhaps the ghost story works best when it is set in the past. One thing is as certain now as when these stories were published almost fifty years ago: the intention is that, having read them, the reader will very definitely Sleep No More.

  Christopher Roden

  Penyffordd

  November, 1995

  The Mine

  THERE WAS A HIGH WEST WIND over the S
hropshire March—a boisterous, buffeting wind that swept down the slopes of the Long Mynd and over the Vale of Severn to send November leaves whirling through the darkness from the mane of Wenlock Edge. It cried about the walls of the Miner’s Arms at Cliedden, hurling sudden scuds of rain to rattle like flung gravel against the window-panes. It was a night to make men glad of the warmth and cheer of the fireside.

  ‘Why is it called Hell’s Mouth? Ah, now that’s a long story, that is.’

  With a natural sense of drama, the old man paused to allow the interest of his audience to quicken. He took a deep and noisy draught from the mug which was mulling on the hob, filled a yellowing clay with fine black shag from a battered tin and lit it with an untidy spill of newspaper which he thrust between the bars of the grate. Then at last, settling himself more comfortably in the chimney-corner, he began his tale.

  ‘If you got here afore dark, maybe you noticed the old mines on the hill yonder. Well, they were lead-mines, and were working up to—let me see—fifteen years ago; all but the one right on top of the hill, that is, and that’s been closed these fifty years. Now, this be the mine you’ve been on about, though in the old days it were called Long Barrow Mine because there’s a great mound up there which they do say was some old burial-place when Adam was a boy-chap. I never heard tell of anyone who could say rightly who were buried there, although folks who know about such things have set to a-digging there many a time, but never got much forrarder. Not that any of them stayed at it very long. It seemed to get on their nerves like, for it be a queer lonely place up there even in day-time, and, though rabbits do swarm on these hills, you’ll never see a one there, nor any other natural creature neither. Knowing what I know, I don’t blame them for packing up.

  ‘Now, in the old days when my father were a young man there was a horse-tram road—Ginny Rails we call ’em—between the mines and Cliedden Wharf down here in the valley. This wharf was the end of an old arm that used to run to the Shroppie Cut by Fens Moss, but it has been dry now these many years, and you wouldn’t see no sign of it today save you knew where to look. About the time I was born the railway came, and soon after that they made a steam tramway up to the mines. They kept the same narrow gauge, only the track were different—better laid, and went a deal farther round, to ease the grade. They still used horses then to draw the trams up the branch roads from the mines ready for the engine to pick up, and this were my first job as a nipper, walking one of these horses up from Half-way Mine to the main road. Then, when I was twenty or thereabouts, I got the job of firing on one of the engines, and proud as Punch I was. She’d seem pretty queer to you folks nowadays, but she was a grand little engine in them days, and I used to keep her brass Bristol fashion, and the copper band round her funnel shone like my mother’s kettle.

  ‘It was about this time—one Michaelmas—that the trouble started in Long Barrow Mine. I can remember it as plain as if it were yesterday. We had our shed up there then, and we’d just come up with our last load of empties, unhooked, and were running the engine into shed, when the chaps came up off shift. Now, the path from the mine down the hill led past the door of our shed, and I had dropped my fire and was having a last look round just to see as everything was right for the night as they come walking by. Usually they would be a-chattering, joking and calling to each other, for they were a merry lot, but this night they were quiet like or talking hushed to each other, and this was the first thing that struck me as being a bit queer. So when one of them that was a cousin of mine—Joe Beecher his name was—come walking by, I called out to him to know what they was all acting so glum about. He turned back into the shed and told me what the trouble was. It was fast falling dark by this time, but I can see his face now in the light of my fire, which was still a-glowing between the rails by the door.

  ‘They had struck a new vein just about that time and it seems that Joe and his mate had been working on this new level. Mind you, it wasn’t like the mines you know of today, for there was only about fifteen men at the most below ground. Well, at midday they knocked off for a bite of “Tommy”, and started walking back to the road to join their mates. When they got half of the way, he said, his mate Bill remembered he’d left his tea-can behind, and set off back to fetch it while Joe went on and joined the others. They had a laugh about Bill when he was so long finding his can, but when snapping time was nearly up and still no sign of him, Joe said he got a bit worried, and set off down the level to see what had happened to him. He got to the end, and then he said he came over horrid queer because Bill wasn’t there at all, so that he felt scared of the dark and the hush there, and hollered out for the others to come down. So they came and looked, too, and sure enough there was nothing to be seen of Joe’s mate. There’d been no fall to bury him, and of course there was no other way out of the level. They just stood there for a moment very quiet like, and then set off back to the road again as fast as they could. Joe said something seemed to be telling him that the sooner he cleared out the better for him, and he reckoned the others must have felt that way, too. He finished up by saying something that sounded a bit crazed to me at the time, about the darkness being angry. Anyway, none of them durst set foot in that level for a long while after that.’

  The old man paused, drained his beer-mug, and, sucking the drooping fringe of his moustache, seemed to ruminate sadly over its emptiness.

  His mug replenished and his reeking pipe re-lit, he settled himself once more and resumed his tale.

  ‘Nothing else happened for a twelve month or more, except that they had to give up the new level because no one would work there. But there come a time when they’d worked out the veins on the old levels, and it was a matter of opening up the new level again, seeing as it was very rich, or shutting down altogether. Things had quieted down a bit by this, mind, but for all that they had to give the chaps more pay afore they’d agree to go back.

  ‘It must have been a fortnight or more after they’d started on the new level again, that we were up there waiting for a return load of trams, and had gone into the winding-house to have a word with Harry Brymer, who was engine-man there in them days. Died ten year ago up at his daughter’s at Coppice Holt, he did. It was an old beam winder as was there then, gone for scrap a long time back, though you can still see the engine-house plain as can be on top of the hill, while the old chimney be a landmark ten mile away on a clear day.

  ‘Well, Harry was telling us how they’d had nothing but trouble ever since they’d started on the new level—nothing much, mind, but just enough to make the men nervy and talk of an ill luck on the place, although Harry said he reckoned nothing to it for his part.

  ‘It was while we were talking to Harry, leaning over the guard rails round the drum and having a smoke, that the bell wire started to play the monkey. There was no such new-fangled notion as electricity in those days, of course, and the signal for winding was a bell as was hung on the wall and rung from the shaft bottom by a wire cable working through pulleys and guides. Well, it was this cable that started a-jangling to and fro in the guides just enough to set the bell moving, but not enough to ring it proper. The three of us stopped our clacking and stood dumbstruck watching this bell moving and the cable jerking. And somehow it felt queer standing there in the half-light watching it and waiting for it to make up its mind, like, whether to ring or not. Then all on a sudden it starts ringing like mad, and kept on, too; so Harry started winding while we went to the doorway to look for the cage, for by that time we had a notion as summat was up. When her came there was only one man on her and that was Joe Beecher; I just caught a sight of his face as he come up and I’ll never forget the way he looked. He never said nor shouted nothing, nor even saw us, but almost afore the cage stopped he was off and away across the yard, and we could see him running for dear life over the waste mound and along the hillside. And as he ran he kept looking back over his shoulder and then running the harder, for all the world as though Old Nick hisself were after him. Then he got to Dyke Wo
od, and we lost sight of him because it was that dark under the trees.

  ‘Now this gave Harry and me a pretty turn, I can tell you, but that was nothing to my mate. When we were watching Joe a-running he lets out a yell like a screech owl and then cries out loud, “Run, run, for Christ’s sake!” When we couldn’t see Joe no more we turned to look at him and he’d gone down all of a heap on the floor. We reckoned then he must have seen summat as we missed, but it was some hours afore he came round, and a week or more afore he could talk plain. Even then it very near set him off again in the telling. I can tell you that if I’d known then what it was he saw, I’d never have gone down that mine as I did with several others as had been working above ground. Even as it was, it was a bit strange, to say the least, going down in that cage and wondering what we were going to see when we got to the bottom.

  ‘I know that none of us expected what we did find when we had stepped out of the cage and walked off down the new level—just the quiet and the dark—not a sign of a mortal soul. I understood then what poor Joe had meant about the darkness being angry. I’m not an educated man; if I were maybe I could find a better word for the feeling there was down in that mine. It just told me pretty plain that we weren’t wanted down there, and the sooner we cleared out the better for us. I reckon the others must have felt the same thing, for we soon set off back to the cage, walking pretty smart for a start and finishing at a run, so that we fell a-jostling back into the cage like so many sheep into a pen, and mighty glad we were to see daylight, I can tell you.’

  The old man paused, rubbing his hands nervously one over the other and drawing his chair nearer to the fire as though suddenly chilled.