One reviewer of this recent 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 available 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 awaiting exploitation. It is not without significance that the most successful story in the collection just referred to should be the one which is set most firmly in the present time. This is Michael Asquith’s ‘The Uninvited Face’. Here the theme is as old as the hills—it is the same as that of Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea’—but the treatment, with the victim an atomic physicist, and the clever introduction of surrealism, is as modern as the hour.
Yes, the ghost story has a future still, of that I am convinced. Scientist and materialist have not succeeded in banishing the Night Side of Nature. For Christian Men the devil still walks abroad and has merely changed his disguise. I propose to conclude this essay with a few examples of possible new treatments of old themes, but a tiresome interruption compels me to put down my pen for a moment. Curiously enough, like the man in that untold ghost story in A Winter’s Tale, I live by a churchyard, too. The burial ground is disused, but a glance from my window has just revealed that something unusual is going on there. Those maddening men from the Post Office have already been told that they could not site their new telephone pole there, yet although it is now almost dark under the yews, I think I can see them in their white, hooded duffel coats digging the hole for it. I shall have to speak to them at once; really, nowadays, nothing is sacred . . .
Editorial Note [from The Saturday Book]: It is regrettable that owing to unforeseen circumstances this interesting essay was never completed. The Editor hopes that readers will endorse his opinion that the above fragment was worthy of inclusion here.
L. T. C. Rolt and Two Ghost Stories
by Hugh Lamb
(First published in All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society Number 8, February 1995, and reprinted by kind permission of the author)
THE WELCOME REPRINT by Christopher and Barbara Roden of L. T. C. Rolt’s last two ghost stories, ‘The Shouting’ and ‘The House of Vengeance’, reminded me that I’ve still got the correspondence with Rolt about their first publication in my anthologies, and this led to a pleasant meander down memory lane when I dug out the letters. Readers might like to know more about the stories’ origins.
My first encounter with Rolt’s ghost stories was ‘The Mine’, in Edmund Crispin’s Best Tales of Terror (1962), which led to tracking down a copy of Sleep No More (it took a very long time—a very scarce book!). When I came to think about using a Rolt story, the first candidate was my favourite from the book, ‘Hawley Bank Foundry’. This had escaped reprinting since 1948, and was a natural choice for one of my books. It led to an exchange of letters with Rolt which lasted just over a year, ending only with his death. He proved to be a generous correspondent, replying to every letter in detail, and I never had an inkling that he was ill right up to his final letter.
I first wrote to Rolt in February 1973, to get his permission to use ‘Hawley Bank Foundry’ in A Wave of Fear. A couple of months later I was drawing up a list of stories for what turned out to be The Thrill of Horror and wrote to Rolt again, asking if he’d written any more stories since Sleep No More. He wrote back:
The answer to your query is no, I have not written any further ghost stories since Sleep No More. The reason was quite honestly its poor sales. Ghost stories seem to me to be a very odd by-way of literature in that the market for new material seems to be so small and yet this very small field is picked over and over again by anthologists whose collections seem to go on selling. This means that, because the field is so small, the same stories tend to be used in anthologies over and over again. It is all inexplicable to me! [but] I will seriously consider contributing an original story . . . the author is always said to be the last person to judge his own work but personally I think the best story in [Sleep No More] is the last one ‘Music Hath Charms’.
Another letter from Rolt had this to say:
I have never found writing original ghost stories very easy . . . one thinks ‘that would make a good subject for a ghost story’ but the difficult thing I find is to convert the idea into a suitable plot. Maybe fiction is not really me métier!
In October 1973 he sent me the MS of ‘The Shouting’, with the following details:
I worked this story up from an actual experience that happened to my wife. She was at such a cottage in Devon when a party of children came past and when she asked them where they were going they replied ‘We’re going for the shouting’. Then they really did go on and shout in the wood.
In a second letter in answer to my query, he wrote:
As to the reason for the shouting, there really is no answer. The children merely disappeared into the wood, shouted, and then in due course trailed back again. Unlike the strange creatures in my story, they were perfectly normal children, but the episode was a little odd none the less.
Mrs Rolt had a little more to say on this in a letter after Rolt’s death: ‘. . . the idea of the children in the West Country valley with hanging woods was something which actually happened to me when I was furnishing a house for the Landmark Trust’.
In January 1974, Rolt mentioned that he had been asked to contribute an original story to an established series of anthologies. I won’t say which one, to spare the editor’s feelings, but in March 1974 Rolt reported the following:
Unfortunately the story has been rejected by the editor who called it ‘a story of gothic horror that doesn’t come off’. Whether it comes off or not is something I cannot say, but it wasn’t intended to be a story of gothic horror but rather a story based on the ‘old religion’.
I thought the editor was mistaken, and still do: ‘The House of Vengeance’, the story in question, is one of Rolt’s best tales, a fine last work. Considering he wrote it at a time, as I was to discover, when he was becoming progressively more unwell, its quality is even more remarkable.
W. H. Allen had meanwhile passed over what was to be The Thrill of Horror in favour of Victorian Tales of Terror, so I had to tell Rolt that ‘The Shouting’ would be held up for a while. I was shocked at his reply, dated 2 April, 1974:
I am sorry to tell you that I am in very indifferent health. Having spent the last two years on and off exploring my insides, my doctors seem to have given me up as a bad job and this may well mean that by the time you publish these two stories, I may no longer be here to see them.
L. T. C. Rolt died on 9 May, 1974. He was right—he never saw his last two stories in print, and I found it one of the most unhappy experiences of my editing career. Although I never met Rolt, I valued our correspondence, brief as it was. And I do have some small pride at having published his last two stories for him.
‘The Shouting’ was first published in The Thrill of Horror (W. H. Allen, 1975); ‘The House of Vengeance’ was first published in The Taste of Fear (W. H. Allen, 1976).
Joanna Dowling’s jacket art for the
First Edition of Sleep No More (1948)
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