SLEEP NO MORE

by L. T. C. Rolt

  ‘Ghosts!’ she will exclaim contemptuously when taxed with the rumour. ‘Ah, I a’ seen plenty on ’em—four-footed ’uns wi’ long tails, that’s all as ’aunts Ashcombe. Old ’Lisha Peart’s bin tellin’ you the tale down the Penderville, I can see. That owd rascal ’ud see Owd Nick hisself fer a pint o’ scrumpy.’

  Other obvious sources of information are not readily available. The present owner, young Dick Penderville, is in the Forces overseas, and in any case he has never lived in the house. The last tenants, Mr and Mrs Amos Bingley, an elderly childless couple, are now dead.

  Amos Bingley was a typical example of the successful Black Country manufacturer. 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. It ended after the First World War, when he ceased to take an active part in the affairs of Messrs Amos Bingley and Company, Chain and Shackle Makers, and retired with a small, but adequate fortune. Sentiment, or more probably a folk memory derived from ancestors who combined chain-making with agriculture in days before the Black Country was black, had given him a craving for country life which he was at last able to satisfy by playing the country squire at Ashcombe. He cut a strange figure in this rôle, a squat figure of uncouth gait and with a bull-neck so short as to convey the impression of stooping, and to conceal from the casual glance the great breadth of shoulder and depth of chest. His enormous hands, obviously better fitted to grasp a sledge-hammer than a walking-stick, had never lost their callouses, nor his tongue its broad dialect. He made no attempt to ape the gentry, and while the vicar and the local ‘county’ regarded him askance, the villagers respected him, for forthrightness is a quality which the countryman has always cherished in himself and admired in others. His fierce Calvinistic piety brought a new lease of life to the little stone chapel opposite the Penderville Arms and still further antagonised the vicar who believed that the Manor should be the pillar of the church. But while Amos Bingley may thus be said to have feared God, he certainly feared nothing else, or rather he did not do so until he came to Ashcombe. I do not know whether, at the time he took up his tenancy, he heard any rumour concerning the house, but if he had I do not doubt that his reaction would have been similar to that of old Mrs Greening, though couched in even more forceful language. In his rough passage through life he had encountered no power that a hard head or great physical strength could not match. His religion might smoulder with threats of hell-fire, but outside the four walls of the chapel he recognised no fires other than the white-hot reality of his furnace-flames. 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.

  Mr Amos Bingley is now beyond question, but even if time or circumstance permitted, it is very doubtful if he would have been capable of giving any coherent account of his experience. For Mr Bingley’s tenure was briefly, summarily and painfully terminated. Two years, almost to the day, after he first crossed the threshold of his new home, he left Ashcombe in a strait-jacket to die a few months later in Barnwell Asylum. This shocking event was the occasion of much comment in the district at the time. The villagers declared that he had suddenly lost all his money, and that the shock had proved too much for him. The parson regarded the event as evidence of the perils of non-conformity, while the gentry dismissed a distressing subject simply with a lift of the eyebrows and a significant movement of the elbow. But, in fact, the fortunes of Bingley and Company were as prosperous as ever, while although old Amos had been given to drinking-bouts in his younger days, he had grown abstemious with years for, like many men of his occupation, the chapel had taken the place of the public-house. The unfortunate Mrs Bingley left the district at once and went to live with her sister in Dudley, where she did not long survive her husband.

  Apart from a few scraps of information grudgingly wrung from old Mrs Greening at the Lodge, our only clues to the peculiar events which seem to have occurred at Ashcombe Manor in the years 1922 and 1923 are contained in the weekly letters which Mrs Bingley wrote to her sister, and which the latter fortunately preserved.

  It appears that for the first few months all went well; Mrs Bingley’s letters describe in detail the process of domestic settlement and re-arrangement. It seems that Amos possessed an able partner who was not slow to stamp Ashcombe with the impress of her determined personality. Although the house was already partly furnished, the new tenants apparently imported a great deal of their own in addition, and I suspect that the result was enough to make the dim shapes of long dead Pendervilles start from those heavy-gilded frames which still hang above the oak staircase. The work of transforming Ashcombe to conform with Mrs Bingley’s notions of domestic comfort was largely entrusted to Mrs Greening. It is clear that this formidable old retainer was too freely inclined to express ideas of her own which did not always agree with those of her new mistress. ‘She will keep on with her “Old Sir John used to say this”, or “Old Sir John would never have had that”, until I could clout her,’ wrote Eliza Bingley. Nevertheless, no serious clash between the two women occurred until, nine months after her arrival, Mrs Bingley decided to use the Arms room.

  The Arms room at Ashcombe is situated at the south-east angle of the building and on the ground floor. It has one large window facing east, and originally possessed a second, smaller window looking south across lawn and common to the church. This south window, however, has been blocked up owing, it is commonly supposed, to the window-tax. Whoever was responsible for this alteration was evidently anxious that it should not disfigure the balance of the façade, for the glazed casement has been retained in front of the infilling, an expedient which is quite successful. Seen from the common, the sham window easily escapes notice, and it is only on closer approach that it becomes apparent that the Manor possesses a ‘blind eye’. A similar attempt at disguise has been made upon the inside. Here a second casement has been inserted and glazed with mirrors which, by their reflection, effectually lighten the deep embrasure in which the window is set. The effect is curious, the stranger approaching the window obliquely being startled to find himself confronted by his own image. In the centre of the panelled wall, directly opposite the mirror window stands the fireplace. It is surmounted by an unusually rich Jacobean overmantel. Upon this appear, in centre and flanking panels, the arms of the Pendervilles and of the families with whom they were linked by marriage.

  Anyone who has been to Ashcombe will appreciate the necessity for this description because the Arms room is not open to inspection by the casual visitor on the grounds that certain intimate and valuable family possessions are stored there.

  When the Bingleys came to Ashcombe, the Arms room was locked, but it was not long before the indefatigable Eliza, anxious to survey every cranny of her new domain, was rattling the latch of the door. Where was the key? Mrs Greening grudgingly admitted that it must be down at the Lodge. Later, however, she confessed that she must have mislaid it, and, in the general turmoil of moving in, the subject of the locked room was shelved. But only temporarily. Mrs Bingley was not to be put off so easily, and soon, in response to her renewed demands, Mrs Greening was compelled to find the key. Although the room was quite unfurnished and had obviously been unoccupied for many years, the great fireplace appealed to Mrs Bingley’s ideas of manorial grandeur, and she resolved forthwith that this should be her dining-room. Her decision was not without good reason. The existing dining-room faced south and west whereas, she argued, the Arms room would catch all the morning sun, and yet remain pleasantly cool and shaded on hot summer evenings. Mrs Greening, however, thought otherwise, and did not hesitate to say so in no uncertain terms. Her reasons, that Sir John had never used the room, and that it was ‘a nasty, dark, cold, smelly old place, anyway’, were not sufficient to deter Mrs Bingley, and old Mrs Greening was forced to retire discomfited from an encounter which would have cost most servants their place.

  In fact, l
ike her husband, Eliza Bingley seems to have possessed a will which thrived on opposition. After an orgy of scrubbing and polishing, the Arms room took on a new lease of life, and soon the Black Country chain-maker was sitting down to dine in his baronial hall beneath the carved bearings of his forerunners. The room may have been a little gloomy, as Mrs Greening had said, but it certainly was not cold. In fact, as Mrs Bingley told her sister, with a great log-fire blazing in the open hearth, it was apt to grow almost uncomfortably warm. But these were matters of little or no account; a feature of the room which caused more concern was an unpleasant smell which was occasionally noticeable. When Mrs Greening had referred to the room as ‘a smelly old place’ she may not have used the epithet in a strictly literal sense, and it was certainly not understood in such a light. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the room did smell. At first, Mrs Bingley identified it as the stale odour of previous meals hanging in the air owing to inadequate ventilation, and she ordered the window to be opened wide whenever the room was unoccupied. Apparently this expedient proved ineffective, for we soon find Mrs Bingley tracing the source of the trouble to the fireplace. Some sort of interference between the dining-room and kitchen flues was suspected. Builder and sweep were called in, patent cowls were fitted to both chimneys, and the cook was ordered to stop using the kitchen range as an incinerator for scraps of meat or old bones, a practice she apparently denied with some heat, although charged with it on more than one occasion. Yet despite these efforts the source of the trouble was still elusive. The nuisance was not constant. Sometimes it was unnoticeable, while at others, usually towards evening, the unpleasant odour became so strong that a less determined woman than Eliza Bingley might have abandoned the room To have done so, however, would have meant admitting defeat to Mrs Greening, and that she would never do. Even the first curious incidents connected with the mirror window did not shake her stubbornness. Attributing her experience to defective vision, she announces her intention of visiting an oculist in Cheltenham, and, in her next letter, assigns a similar hallucination of her husband’s to the same cause. Whether this explanation really satisfied her we cannot know.

  She had had occasion to return to the Arms room after dinner. It was the month of February, and the room was lit only by the firelight. (There was no electric light at Ashcombe in those days.) She noticed that the smell was unpleasantly strong and resolved to tax the cook once more with burning rubbish in the range. As she passed by, she happened to glance into the embrasure of the mirror window, and saw the flickering firelight reflected in the glass. It was only a momentary glance, and it was not until she was out of the room that it occurred to her that there was anything odd about what she had seen. Then she realised that as she had crossed directly between the fireplace and the window, she should have seen her silhouette reflected in the mirror, whereas she could swear that all she had noticed was the uninterrupted reflection of the fire. Her husband’s experience a few days later was complicated by another strange feature. Not only did the mirror window fail to record old Amos, but he swore positively, and with some force, that whereas the real fire had been reduced to a few red embers, the reflected fire burned brightly so that the room was illuminated, not so much by the fireplace, as by a ruddy glare which streamed from the mirror.

  An unpleasant smell and an optical illusion; these were apparently the only incidents which gave warning of the sequel which Mrs Bingley records, ungrammatically and often scarcely legibly, in her last letter. It was only when she was preparing for bed, she writes, that she remembered that she had left her bag on her chair in the Arms room. The smell was stronger than she had ever known it, but the fire had burned low and she noticed with relief that no bright glare, such as her husband had described, shone out of the embrasure. It, too, was dark. Emboldened, she determined to dispose of her previous illusion, and, standing directly before the fireplace, she looked into the mirror for her reflection. It was not there. She turned away hurriedly and groped for her bag, but when she re-passed the window she could not resist a second glance. This time a dark shape partly obscured the reflected firelight. Her first feeling was one of relief until, like a child making shadow-pictures, she waved her hand and wagged her head idiotically from side to side. The form in the mirror did not move, and there dawned upon her with dreadful certainty the conviction that the mirror was no longer a mirror but a window; that the fire which glowed there was not the fire which burned in the room; that the shadow she saw there was not her shadow. The tables were now turned upon her for, while terror held her motionless, the shadow began to move. Though the light was too dim to distinguish detail of form or movement, yet both contrived to convey an intensity of purpose which was horribly confirmed by faint scratching and pattering sounds, as if nails scratched upon the glass of a window and clawed the putty from the panes. At this, Mrs Bingley recovered the use of her limbs, and in less time than it takes to tell she was back in the drawing-room, trembling from head to foot and obviously on the verge of collapse.

  Ignoring her hysterical efforts to dissuade him, old Amos Bingley got up from his chair, seized the heavy poker from the hearth in one great hand and the lamp in the other, and set off down the passage. What went on inside the Arms room then we can only conjecture. Eliza says she heard the heavy door flung open and then slammed shut with a force which shook the house. This was followed by a prolonged series of sickening thuds and crashes accompanied by the voice of Amos bellowing inarticulately like an enraged bull. Yet what apparently frightened Mrs Bingley much more was a fainter, sibilant kind of noise which all this hubbub and commotion could not quite drown. Although she could distinguish no words it sounded, to use her own description, ‘as if someone who had lost their voice was trying to shout’. At length, she heard Amos Bingley cry out more loudly than ever in a tone she had never heard before, and then complete silence fell upon the house.

  By this time the cook and the housemaid had joined Mrs Bingley in the drawing-room, but it was some time before the white-faced trio could pluck up the courage to creep down the corridor to the Arms room. They were confronted with a scene of indescribable confusion. The furniture was smashed to matchwood. Even the panelling exhibits to this day the marks of the blows of the poker which lay in a corner of the room, twisted as though it had been a length of lead piping. In the midst of a welter of splintered wood, crumpled carpet, torn curtains and broken china, Amos Bingley lay insensible, his face a rigid mask of terrified fury. He had evidently been burned by the smashed lamp, for his clothes were smouldering, while his hands were blistered and blackened as though he had plunged them into a fire. The sickly stench in the room was intolerable.

  I have no positive explanation to offer for this strange story, although the following fruits of local archaeological research may possibly have some bearing upon the matter.

  The name ‘Arms room’ would appear to be of comparatively recent origin for, in an eighteenth-century inventory of the Manor which the agent courteously permitted me to examine, it is referred to as ‘Sir Neville’s Parlour’. This presumably commemorates Sir Neville Penderville (1576–1639) who became Lord of the Manor of Ashcombe in 1608, and who was commended by James I for his zeal as a magistrate.

  From a study of the Manorial Rolls it transpires that Matthew Hopkins, the celebrated (or infamous) witchfinder, visited the neighbourhood in 1637, and that as a result Deborah Golightly, described as an elderly widow living alone at Hobs Cottage, Ashcombe Bottom, was arraigned, tried and convicted of the practice of witchcraft and necromancy. She was sentenced to death by hanging, her body to be subsequently burned, these enactments being shortly afterwards carried out ‘upon the common called the Church Common in the parish of Ashcombe’.

  The Garside Fell Disaster

  ‘YES, I’M AN OLD RAILWAYMAN I AM, and proud of it. You see, I come of a railway family, as you might say, for I reckon there’ve been Boothroyds on the railway—in the signal cabin or on the footplate mostly—ever since old Geordie Stevenson was
about. We haven’t always served the same company. There were four of us. My two elder brothers followed my father on the North-Western, but I joined the Grand Trunk, and Bert, our youngest, he went east to Grantham. He hadn’t been long there before he was firing on one of Patrick Stirling’s eight-foot singles, the prettiest little locos as ever was or ever will be I reckon. He finished up driver on Ivatt’s “Atlantics” while Harry and Fred were working “jumbos” and “Precursors” out of Crewe. I could have had the footplate job myself easy enough if I’d a mind; took it in with my mother’s milk I did, if you follow my meaning. But (and sometimes I’m not sure as I don’t regret it) I married early on, and the old woman persuaded me to go for a more settled job, so it was the signal box for me. A driver’s wife’s a widow most o’ the week, see, unless he happens to click for a regular local turn.

  ‘The first job I had on my own was at Garside on the Carlisle line south of Highbeck Junction, and it was here that this business as I was speaking of happened; a proper bad do it was, and the rummest thing as ever I had happen in all my time.

  ‘Now you could travel the railways from one end to t’other, Scotland and all, but I doubt you’d find a more lonesome spot than Garside, or one so mortal cold in winter. I don’t know if you’ve ever travelled that road, but all I know is it must have cost a mint of money. You see, the Grand Trunk wanted their own road to Scotland, but the East Coast lot had taken the easiest pick, and the North-Western had the next best run through Preston and over Shap, so there was nothing else for them but to carry their road over the mountains. It took a bit of doing, I can tell you, and I know, for when I was up there, there was plenty of folks about who remembered the railway coming. They told me what a game it was what with the snow and the wind, and the clay that was like rock in summer and a treacle pudding in winter.