Borrowing by Paul May

The Borrowers is a remarkable book. Marcus Crouch called it 'flawless', and I agree with him. He also said that 'by its idea alone, one of the few really original ideas in children's literature, it would have been a landmark.' It is a dark and frightening book which is made bearable only by the brilliance of the characterisation and the precise realisation of the Borrowers' lives. It has atmospheric line illustrations by Diana Stanley and wonderful dialogue, but it would be inaccurate to describe it as 'fun' or 'twee'—words I've seen used to describe film adaptations. If you only know the Borrowers through their screen incarnations I recommend you read the book as soon as possible. The Sunday Times review on the back of my copy sums it up brilliantly: 'Beautifully written, poetic and almost always alarming, The Borrowers books have something very mysterious, sad and exciting about them.'

The book is a landmark and also, I think, a culmination. When I was reading it I found myself thinking of several of the other Carnegie winners I'd read recently. It seems to me that The Borrowers represents a synthesis of the most successful elements of those earlier books. The Clock family, Homily, Pod and Arrietty, reminded me of the Ruggles family in The Family from One End Street, and of the evacuated working-class families in Visitors from London. The Clocks, despite being only five inches tall are ordinary, recognisable people who live in a terrifyingly hostile world. Pod and Homily know about the dangers, but Arrietty is young and foolhardy and brave, and has to learn the hard way.

The Clocks are real people. There is nothing magical about them, but they do keep out of the way of 'human beans' and 'being seen' is the worst thing that can happen to them—well, almost the worst. They are, in fact, rather like BB's Little Grey Men, although in The Little Grey Men the characters are nowhere near as vivid and lively as those in The Borrowers and there is hardly a female in sight. Still, the close observation of the natural world from the point of view of a very small person finds echoes in The Borrowers as Arrietty goes outside for the first time:

'Cautiously she moved towards the bank and climbed a little nervously in amongst the green blades. As she parted them gently with her bare hands, drops of water plopped on her skirt and she felt the red shoes become damp. But on she went, pulling herself up now and again by rooty stems into this jungle of moss and wood-violet and creeping leaves of clover.'

Mary Norton

In The Little Grey Men we have this kind of thing: 'Being a damp sort of a place, weeds of all kinds flourished: all those plants which love water crowded round; giant dock, appearing not unlike the riverside plants of a tropical stream, with huge hairy columns for stalks as thick round as trees . . .'

There is a slight whiff of the schoolroom in BB's nature descriptions which is entirely absent from The Borrowers. Arrietty's journey (the first time she has ever been outside) is vividly realised, but also terrifying. Note the 'nervously' and even the 'blades' in the extract above. As we read about her bare hands and the drops of water and the red shoes we can't help thinking of blood. Well, I can't anyway. Further down the page we have this: ' . . . she knew about woodlice. There were plenty of them at home under the floor. Homily always scolded her if she played with them because, she said, they smelled of old knives.' A few lines later the chapter concludes like this: 'Startled, she caught her breath. Something had moved above her on the bank. Something had glittered. Arrietty stared.'

Illustration by Diana Stanley

Passages of description in The Borrowers always exist to create tension or to move the plot forward. Walter de la Mare also used detailed and poetic descriptions of the natural world from a small person's perspective, most notably in Memoirs of a Midget, but where de la Mare liked to cause unease by hinting at things unseen, Mary Norton made her Borrowers most emphatically real. And look at the Boy's reaction when he first sees Arrietty and she asks why he wants to kill her:

'In case,' came the surprised whisper at last, 'you ran towards me, quickly, through the grass . . . in case,' it went on, trembling a little, 'you scrabbled at me with your nasty little hands.' 

Mary Norton is evoking the human fear of the rat, I think, and it is as rats that the Borrowers will be exterminated if Mrs Driver has her way at the end of the book. It is a more visceral fear than those de la Mare conjures up in many pages of a barely glimpsed supernatural presence in his story, The Scarecrow, and the Boy's terrified reaction at this point gives us a warning of the way adults are likely to react if they find the Borrowers.

Whether or not Mary Norton was aware of these earlier writers we can't know for sure. I like to think she may have borrowed from them and she may also have borrowed from de la Mare the distancing or framing device that she uses to tell the story, though she certainly makes it her own and de la Mare is not the only one to use this kind of approach. The reader knows from the first paragraph that they are in the hands of a wonderfully skilful and assured writer:

'It was Mrs May who first told me about them. No, not me. How could it have been me - a wild, untidy, self-willed little girl who stared with angry eyes and was said to crunch her teeth?'

So, the author, Mary Norton, pretends to be a little girl who is hearing this story from Mrs May, and then says that it can't have been her, perhaps because she no longer recognises the little girl she once was. And then it turns out that Mrs May is only relaying a story told her by her brother, who was given to 'strange imaginings'. 'There was something about him,' says Mrs May, 'perhaps because we were brought up in India among mystery and magic and legends - something that made us think he saw things that other people could not see; sometimes we'd know he was teasing, but at other times - well, we were not so sure . . . '

This is a wartime book, just as much as were We Couldn't Leave Dinah and Visitors from London, even though it is set in the time of Queen Victoria. Mary Norton wrote about the origin of the book. She describes (in the introduction to the Puffin Complete Borrowers) how undiagnosed short-sightedness in childhood led her to focus on tiny things seen up close. 'What would it be like, this child would wonder, lying prone upon the moss, to live among such creatures—human oneself to all intents and purposes, but as small and vulnerable as they.'

These childhood imaginings were forgotten until 'just before the 1940 war, when a change was creeping over the world as we had known it . . . There were human men and women who were being forced to live (by stark and tragic necessity) the kind of life a child had once envisaged for a race of mythical creatures. One could not help but realise (without any thought of conscious symbolism) that the world at any time could produce its Mrs Drivers who would in turn summon their Rich Williams. And there would be.' (Rich Williams is the rat-catcher.)

A N Wilson saw something slightly different in the book. Having noted that 'the ingenious way in which Pod and Homily 'make do' with cast-offs . . . does reflect the resourcefulness of British families during the austerity years', and having also suggested that the terrible destruction of the Borrowers' home, with the roof ripped off, 'owes much to the British experience of losing houses and possessions through aerial bombardment', he goes on to say:

'Many readers in 1952, however, the year of the book's publication and of George VI's death, must have seen a faint parallel between Arrietty, last of her strange race and guardian of the Borrowers' future, and the figure of Princess Elizabeth.' Wilson also apparently described the book as, in part, an allegory of post-war Britain 'with its picture of a diminished people living in an old, half-empty house.'

The fact that Mary Norton denied 'any thought of conscious symbolism' doesn't mean there's no symbolism in the book, but I value the book's truthfulness more than its symbolism. We live in an uncertain world with unpredictable dangers ahead. Homily's biggest fear is that one of the Borrowers will be 'seen' and they will have to emigrate. To hear some people talk about 'immigrants' these days you would think it was an easy thing to leave everything you have and flee to another country. It's not so easy for Homily: 

'It's no good, Pod, I won't emigrate!'

'No one's asked you to,' said Pod.

'To go and live like Hendreary and Lupy in a badger's set! The other side of the world, that's where they say it is - all among the earthworms.'

'It's two fields away, above the spinney,' said Pod.

The book is all about weighing up risks and making choices. The Borrowers live with fear and anxiety all the time, and the book ends on a horrifying note as the rat-catcher prepares to smoke out the Borrowers so that his terriers can kill them. Mary Norton carefully leaves her readers with no certainty that the Borrowers have escaped this fate, or even that the story Mrs May's brother told was true. There were no plans at first for a sequel, but in the end there were four more books and a short story prequel, though even after this Mary Norton was not prepared to deliver a straightforward happy ending. She had lived through two world wars and her books mirror the real, unpredictable and dangerous world that she knew; the same world we live in now.

The final words from Peagreen at the end of the final book in the series resonate powerfully today, when 'Stay safe' has replaced 'Have a nice day,' as a farewell greeting at the supermarket checkout. Arrietty says: 

'I only wanted her to know we were safe . . .'

Peagreen looked back at her. He was smiling his quizzical, one-sided smile.

'Are we?' he asked gently. 'Are we? Ever?'

For those eagle-eyed readers who have noticed I haven't mentioned the 1951 Carnegie winner, The Wool-pack, by Cynthia Harnett, I will just say that there is a decent historical novel here struggling to get out from beneath the weight of a wealth of carefully researched detail about life in Tudor times and about the Cotswold wool trade in particular. The Borrowers is by some distance the best book to have won the Carnegie up to this point. The Wool-pack is interesting because it is a signpost towards Rosemary Sutcliff who would, in a few years time, achieve a perfect blend of plot, character and setting in books similar in quality to The Borrowers.  But The Wool-pack is not itself the finished article.

Cynthia Harnett 
Marcus Crouch said of her work: 'The stories are not exciting . . .'
A strange recommendation, but true.

A N Wilson's piece, Royal life as seen under the floorboards in in The Telegraph 4/10/2004 (paywall)

Also worth a look is The Borrowers Anew by Judith Elkin in Books for Keeps

Paul May's website

Walter de la Mare wins the Carnegie by Paul May

 In 1947 the Carnegie Medal was awarded to Walter de la Mare for his Collected Stories for Children. This marked the start of the second decade of the Carnegie and was the first winning book since 1940 to have nothing to do with the Second World War. It has nothing to do with the war because all the stories were written during the 1920s and 1930s and this is another of those awards which were made, not for the book itself, but in recognition of the author’s contribution to children’s literature.

Walter de la Mare c.1924

 

However, even had Walter de la Mare composed all of these stories in wartime it is doubtful whether the war would have had any influence on their content. Current affairs do not find their way into de la Mare’s work. What interests him is the boundary between this world and the various alternate realities of his imagination. Or, to put it another way, de la Mare believes there is something more than this material world; something just glimpsed on the edges of our perception; a spectre, a fairy, a land beneath the sea. He likes places and times where the borders are permeable—empty and abandoned houses, graveyards, twilight. These stories are complex – always more so than they at first appear, and I would have had no trouble devoting this whole post to any single one of them. 

 

It would, in particular, be worth giving lengthy consideration to the story Sambo and the White Mountains, a story about a black servant boy who is desperate to turn his skin white and which was excluded from the later editions of Collected Stories. There are many odd things about this story, which appears to be set half-way between an English country town and the deep south of the USA. Although there are many examples of racial stereotyping within it, I don’t think the story is intentionally racist but, in its attempt not to be so, it reveals how deeply the ideas of white purity and superiority ran unnoticed at the time, and no doubt still do. To illustrate: the old lady in the story makes a death bed speech in which she says ‘a black man whose mind is free from darkness and his mind from cruelty is in truth whiter than any one whose soul is in the shade.’ That’s to say, white is good, and black can be good too, but is likely to be tainted with darkness and cruelty. I don’t think there’s much doubt that this is de la Mare speaking, and it seems he feels he’s saying something enlightened. The Carnegie judges didn’t see a problem here either. It’s because of this embedded assumption of white superiority that I wouldn’t give this to a child to read today, but I think it’s valuable to an adult reader as a snapshot of English attitudes at this moment when the Empire was starting to crumble.

 

 

Sambo and the White Mountains is not a typical de la Mare story—if indeed there is such a thing, given that the stories in this collection vary greatly both in length and in setting—but ‘The Scarecrow’ is much more typical. This was the title story of a collection of four stories published in 1945, but it had originally been published in the miscellany ‘Number Three Joy Street’ in 1923 as ‘Old Joe’.  The stories are far more digestible in small collections. I can’t imagine that many children managed to read the Collected Stories straight though in one go. At the end of ‘The Scarecrow’ Letitia asks her uncle: 

 

‘And . . . and you never saw the – the fairy again?’

            ‘In a way of speaking,’ old Mr Bolsover replied, ‘I have never, Letitia, really seen anything else. It’s a question of what one means exactly by “seeing”, I suppose. Words are no use. It can’t be done, can it?’

 

This is the kind of uncertain territory we are in, and de la Mare believed that these boundaries between worlds were faintest, more like a transparent veil, in childhood, which was for him a kind of ideal state. He hated the books of E Nesbit because, as his biographer Theresa Whistler remarks, ‘he bitterly resented any portrayal of children which snipped off the trailing clouds of glory and presented them as little schemers, scoring off their elders.’

 

‘The Scarecrow’ tells us a lot about de la Mare. Letitia is a small girl visiting her Uncle Tim, Mr Bolsover, and at her prompting he tells her a story which he had started to tell her the year before about the old scarecrow in his garden. This is a technique de la Mare also uses in the story ‘Miss Jemima’ and it achieves several effects at the same time. It allows a reader to identify with either the young girl or with the boy who Mr Bolsover once was. And Letitia is uncomfortably aware of growing older herself: 

 

‘. . .to think it is exactly a whole year since I was here before! Yet you wouldn’t believe a single pink was different. Isn’t that funny, Uncle Tim? We are. And why, yes,’ she went on hastily, twisting her head on her slender neck, ‘there’s that curious old Guy Fawkes creature over there by the willows. He’s not changed a single bit either.’

 

This ‘story within a story’ technique also allows the author to impersonate himself, or perhaps even to mock himself a little. Either way, the avuncular tone is directed to the little girl, rather than to us, the readers. And when, after a paragraph dedicated to a lengthy description of landscape, Uncle Tim says: ‘But I hate descriptions, don’t you, Letitia?’ we know that de la Mare is having rather a good joke with us. Because this story is full of description, as are most of his stories, since another of his techniques is to be very particular. Every detail is described, to the extent that settings seem almost hyper-real.

 

I think it’s also reasonable to believe that Uncle Tim’s is a fair approximation to Walter de la Mare’s own storytelling style. De la Mare did not read aloud to his own four children, rather choosing to tell them stories that he made up. No one in the family helped the children to learn to read. The following passage from Theresa Whistler’s biography is revealing:

 

Over the next few years his habit of telling them stories at bedtime, or in his chair after Sunday dinner, developed more than one imaginary companion, as important to their childhoods as Tatta had been to his own. One such was ‘Peter’. For this de la Mare would ‘go to sleep’ in his armchair after the meal, and then soon the voice of a little boy would begin. Another compelling person, who came through in a similar way, like a spirit possessing a medium, was ‘the Waterman’, whose business was to go from room to room saying goodnight to the children in their beds and offer them a drink of water. He spoke in a wheedling, drawling, broken English, and in old age de la Mare could still summon up his tone and accent. He was a good actor as well as inventive, and no one else could transport the children as completely into a world of fantasy . . . The game hovered on the edge of the alarming and sinister, nicely judged not to overstep the border.

 

Illustration by Irene Hawkins

This last sentence would be a good summing up of Walter de la Mare’s stories for children. He always hovers on the edge—between the seen and the unseen, the describable and the indescribable. And who actually is the narrator of this story, de la Mare or his mouthpiece Uncle Tim? There is so much detailed description in the story but then we have this:

 

‘And the odd thing is that I can’t – can’t possibly describe [the fairy]. This is perhaps partly because the light wasn’t very good, and partly because my eyes were strained with watching. But mostly for other reasons. I seemed, you see, to be seeing her as if I were imagining her, even though I knew quite well she was there.’

 

What would a child make of this? I really don’t know. I was originally going to write a very different piece about the sheer wordiness and indigestibility of these stories, but I changed my mind. By the time I had read all the stories, two of the novels, the biography and the poems for children I had decided that de la Mare is not easy, but worth the effort. These are not attributes likely to endear him to most children however, and others before me have found de la Mare difficult. James Campbell remarked in 2006 that de la Mare ‘fitted himself out in velvet jacket and foppish cap during the later years of Victoria’s reign, and refused to take them off again.’

 

This is amusing but a little harsh. One might equally say that de la Mare remained true to himself and his vision. But I do think he was fond of the sound of his own voice, or voices. The length of many of the short stories in this collection can be daunting and as for the novels . . . But we should remember that Angela Carter said of his Memoirs of a Midget (1921) that it ‘sticks like a splinter in the mind.’ And despite its arcane language and its oddness The Three Mulla-Mulgars (1910) must surely have influenced Tolkien and all who came after. I noticed particularly de la Mare's use of songs and poems in this book, and here he has the advantage over Tolkien that he is a far better poet. I always ignore the songs in Tolkien but I actually read these. 

 

Originally published in 1910 as The Three Mulla-Mulgars

De la Mare’s occasionally circumlocutory prose style can also be a problem. He caught this habit from his youthful admiration for Henry James and never quite shook it off. His poems are quite a different matter and have survived much better than his prose. No one who had only read that prose would ever suspect this talent for brevity. Only the other day someone on the radio selected The Listeners as the poem that helped them through lockdown.  De la Mare and James only met twice and my favourite story from the biography concerns the second of these encounters, which took place on the Thames Embankment:

 

As de la Mare and Naomi were walking one dark wintry day along the Embankment that portly presence loomed suddenly out of the twilight mist . . . Naomi recollected listening for a pious ten minutes to the conversation of ‘two variously labyrinthine minds’. Not much real contact was achieved.

 

Paul May’s website is here.

 

Walter de la Mare’s Short Stories for Children edited by Giles de la Mare includes all the stories and a bibliography.

 

'One Dark And Stormy Night' by Steve Gladwin

Some Reflections On Reading Thirty Two Ghost Stories. 

First, let's see the sixteen authors. For those who pored over last month's blog - and there may well have been a few - here are the same sixteen pictures again, but this time in chronological order. The earliest of them is Edward Bulwe- Lytton, who wrote only one ghost story, but The Haunted and The Haunters is a fine example of the genre. Last is Walter de La Mere, best known of course for his chilling poem The Listeners, which is really a ghost story by any other name, but just happens to be a poem. 

Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1803-1873

Edgar Allen Poe 1809-1849

Sheridan Le Fanu 1814-1873

Ambrose Bierce 1842-1914

Bram Stoker 1847-1912

E Nesbit 1858-1924

Arthur Conan Doyle 1859-1930

Robert Louis Stephenson !862?

Edith Wharton 1862-1937

M.R. James 1862-1936

W.W. Jacobs 1863-1943

Arthur Machen 1863-1947

E.F. Benson 1867-1940

Algernon Blackwood 1869-1951

Oliver Onions 1873-1961

Walter de La Mere 1873-1956

What is immediately apparent is that if you take out the earlier writers at the beginning of the nineteenth century - Bulwer Lytton, Poe and Le Fanu-we see that some of the greatest writers of ghost stories were born within an astonishingly short thirty one year span, beginning with Ambrose Bierce and concluding with Walter de La Mere and Oliver Onions. M.R. James and Edith Wharton were born in the same year, 1862 and W.W. Jacobs and Arthur Machen a year later.

Taking this little further, there were at least five writers who I didn't have the time to read. Of these, L.P. Hartley and H.P. Lovecraft were born later, whereas William Hope Hodgson sits well within the forty year bracket- being born in 1877, but Guy de Maupassant,  O. Henry and Arthur Quiller Couch were born in 1850, 1862, (the same year as Edith Wharton and M. R. James) and 1863, (the year of the births of both W.W. Jacobs and Arthur Machen) respectively. There must surely have been something spooky in the water during those thirty five golden years of creativity.

Well I've spent a good chunk of my spare time in the last few months reading all of these authors and I've enjoyed every moment of it. I was obliged, against my principles, to do my reading on Kindle, because of its amazing collections.In the case of Bulwer-Lytton, as I have just written, there really wasn't another story to read, but I think that reading wise that would be more than made up for by the length of some of the others I read, more than one of which turned out to be novellas. Edith Wharton and Sheridan Le Fanu were particularly guilty in this, especially in the latter's Room at The Dragon Volant, which thoroughly enjoyable as it is, really is rather long. The same goes for Carmilla, but that's such a splendidly chilling account and probably the first true vampire novel, that it was well worth it. The opposite can be said for the brevity of E Nesbit, whose classic Man Sized in Marble, almost made my top five. Nesbit understands in the same way as Stoker and Conan Doyle, the power of brevity in order to make an impact. E. F. Benson's stories were a revelation. I was enthusiastically warned about this, by my good friend Stuart Croskell, who provided me with the wonderful list I had to work through. Without Stu's help and wide reading my knowledge of who to read would have been sketchy at best. There are. however, stories which have the impact of a full on collision, and one of these of Benson's, made my top five.

Rather than spend too much time on analysing all of these writers at length. I'd prefer to concentrate on plot, characterisation and above all atmosphere. Probably the most prolific of these writers was Algernon Blackwood, a recent 'rediscovery, and if there is anyone who can better conjure the deadly elemental power of the outdoors, I'd love to read him, or her. That he, uniquely, can do entirely the opposite by providing equally chilling examples of the claustrophobia and close terror of a whole variety of indoor spaces almost as well as M.R. James does, (which is saying something) shows just how good at this stuff he was. But Sheridan Le Fanu or Edith Wharton or E.F Benson wouldn't be far behind him and the same goes for Walter de La Mere.

The perennial trope of the Haunted House is well illustrated in the stories I've read, but possibly the respective versions of it by Bulwer-Lytton in The Haunted and the Haunters - if you write only one ghost story, best make it as good as this one, or Oliver Onions, the quite stunningly disturbing The Beckoning Fair One which reads at times like Psycho long before Robert Bloch conceived the idea. And no matter how much W.W Jacob's The Monkey's Paw has become a parodied cliche everywhere, that doesn't take away from it's wonderful building of it's three act structure, or that telling moment at the end when you say don't,  just don't answer that door. Ambrose Bierce's well known 'Incident at Owl Creek' is written in a manner well ahead of its time and is hauntingly evocative in its time slipping narrative as much as Edith Wharton's eerie All Souls. M. R. James The Ash Tree is another masterpiece of chilling construction, with the dark sentinel of the old tree and it's resident witch terrifying it's way through three generations.  And if you don't want to be terrified out of your wits and are also squeamish as I am about incidents and instruments of torture, I beg you to avoid Conan Doyle's The Leather Funnel and Bram Stoker's The Squaw. The former takes you to places neither you nor the narrator wishes to go, whereas the latter manages to evoke the tormenting practices of two very different cultures either side of the Atlantic and throw in a sinister black cat for good measure. Of course the most famous black cat came from the pen of Edgar Allen Poe, and really, no-one writes in the same feverish half madness he creates in both The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart.

Before listing my top ten in reverse order, I should explain that I'm only allowing myself to include two stories from each author that I hadn't read before, (with the obvious exception of Bulwer Lytton) and my summing up and grading is based only on these thirty one stories, (co-incidentally the same number as the years span in which nearly all of these authors were born).

So here, in reverse order, are the results. In one or two cases I have read many more of the author's stories than I originally set out to do, Apart from Blackwood, Le Fanu, Edith Wharton, E Nesbit and E.F. Benson had somewhat of an advantage.

10. The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe.This is the story I've known the longest, so I thought it a good idea to visit it again, It could easily have been number one on a different day. Poe's ability to not only reduce a story to the tortured meanderings of a disturbed mind, but to actually render that mind on paper is masterly. No-one has ever captured the disordered mind as well.

9. Seaton's Aunt by Walter de La Mere. When I read the first of my two tales, All Hallows, I was a little confused by the author's 'hands-off' and somewhat ambiguous approach', I was somewhat confused. The evocation of the old cathedral by the sea with something evil at its heart in the former is brilliantly done, but it is nothing to the depiction of the evil personage that is Seaton's Aunt. The feeling of discomfort and creeping dread is in the background all the way through. And yet the mind is left to play with both reality and memory just as its hero in obliged to do. If there is such a thing as leaving a nasty taste in the mind, this story has it in spades. De La Mere's most famous poem The Listener has exactly the same quality.

8. The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. There appear to be two creative sides to Edward Bulwer-Lytton. On the one hand his prolific output is balanced by a reputation of being one of the worst writers ever - it being he incidentally who first came up with the title line which is the title of this blog! But notwithstanding 'one dark and stormy night', if Bulwer Lytton had only written one story, his classic haunted house story is worthy of celebration. Of course his very dates must make him one of the originators of this type of story. He and Poe are the only writers in this group to share such eas rly nineteenth century origins, but both the theme and execution of The Haunted and the Haunters feel very modern. It is also very scary.

7. The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs. This story has undergone so many parodies, (most memorably) as a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Halloween special) and references and jokes not worthy of the original, that it comes as a bit of a shock to discover just how good it is. What hits you first is how it is a classic three act structure, used to perfection. Secondly and somewhat uniquely when we are used to the worlds of James, Blackwood and Machen, say, here are two characters who you come to care enough about to say 'don't answer the door' with feeling. This is one of the most well loved of all ghost stories and fully deserves to be. The other obvious debt The Monkey's Paw has is to folk-tale, of which much more anon. Read it!

6. The Ash Tree by M.R. James. M.R. James is quite possibly the best writer of ghost stories that ever lived and he is often people's first experience of the genre - especially those of us who grew up or saw on later repeats the chilling black and white Christmas ghost stories. Michael Hordern and the terrifying 'sheet monster' is always the stated example, but for me it it was seeing the pale ghosts of the gypsy children, a hole where there hearts should be, with the demonic sound of the hurdy-gurdy in the background.So  Lost Hearts would be high on my list, had I chosen it as one of my reads, but I decided to return to The Ash Tree. This is masterly venture into the power of both nature and stored memory worthy of Blackwood. As in so many of James stories, the ghost or demon is not seen, being evoked instead either by reportage, or the appearance of the many mini Shelobs which are her off-spring. The Ash Tree is another classic example of the three act structure, with the most disturbing of off-stage witches. 

5. The Room in the Tower by E.F.Benson. Entering the top five I will say in advance that any one of these stories could have ended up at number one. No more so than with so with this story, which has a continuous refrain that stays with you for a long time afterwards. If, unlike the protagonist, you don't want the lines 'Jack will show you to your room:I have given you the room in the tower.' to continue into your sleep, I suggest you skip through them when they occur. Part recurring dream come true terror, part meditation on class and place in society, and above all part tale of sheer terror. The Room in the Tower, Benson's most famous tale, has a distinctive power, which despite the deceptively simple prose, which is almost impossible to ignore. Definitely one to put on your ghost story bucket list.

4. The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onions. So many classic ghost stories depend on the mind and whether or not it can be entirely relied on.The Beckoning Fair One is a novella moves without warning from the tale of a recluse with a lady friend to whom he shows no romantic interest in, to her replacement by another kind of female presence, which gradually comes to obsess him, until his alienation from the outside world becomes total and his mind trips into madness. The ending is shockingly unexpected and reads more like something by Val McDeirmid, Taken from his first ghost story collection, 'Widdershins' the story has a shockingly modern, ahead of its time feel to it and a startlingly bleak message underneath its diary like surface.

3. The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen. Talking of bleakness, there is no story more bleak and unforgiving than this one. The Great God Pan has the feel of the rule book not so much being torn up, as flushed down the toilet. It begins with a suitably risky and sinister experiment, followed by the shockingly cruel and dismissive act of a guardian. After this, we can only be fools if we believe that such a callous act can have no consequences, but the cleverness of the narrative causes us to forget, only to be brought back to the shocking reality at the end. To my huge surprise this tale made no great impact on me when I read it three years ago, only for me to be stunned by its power and implications on my recent re-read. Stephen King has called it one of the greatest of all stories. I'm not about to disagree with him, but maybe I'll give it a while before re-reading it!

2. The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood. I make no bones about my rekindled enthusiasm for the stories of Algernon Blackwood and so I deliberately read The Wendigo late on. The result was that it could have made number one, but instead I reviewed all the others and still felt it should come this high, if not at the top. When I read Blackwood's story The Willows, I thought it elementally scary and powerful enough, but nothing prepared my for the power of The Wendigo, another story with a repeated refrain, this time  one terrified and desperate, the voice of the old trapper who has accompanied the narrator on a moose hunting journey in the Canadian wilderness, and found what he most feared and dreaded in The Wendigo, a terrifying monster and animal presence which has the power to lift its victim high into the air while somehow still allowing your tired, tormented feel to walk for hour after hour and even in your sleep. 'Oh, my feet of fire' indeed. One of the great things about Blackwood is that he was so prolific with his dark tales, but this one, like The Willows. The John Silence stories, The Wood of the Dead and May Eve, is one of his very best.

1. At the top comes a story first encountered in another form, many years ago, which I finally read. I left it until last, knowing that in order to make the top of the list, it had to be really, really good. And Sheridan Le Fanu's,Strange Event in the life of Schalken the Painter truly is that, a story so chilling and with such terrifyingly disturbing off-stage implications that its best not to try to get your head round them. I say I'd not read the story, but I had seen the well-known and much praised TV adaptation by the BBC, adapted and directed by Leslie Megahey as part of the series Omnibus, in 1979, in the days when they still did that sort of thing! It was conceived along the lines of an earlier series called A Ghost Story for Christmas and along with the adaptation of James Lost Hearts is one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen. You can see it on youtube, if you don't believe me. It's the story of a corpse who buys a wife - if you want the plot put simply - the mysterious Mr Vanderhausen desires the hand of the lovely Rose Verlderkaust,, ward of the Painter Gerard Douw, much to the consternation of his pupil, Godfrey Schalken. The suitably venal Douw sells out poor Rose to her doom in the disturbingly easy way of such unenlightened times. The most terrifying scene in the adaptation, (especially to an impressionable twenty year old) comes when Jeremy Clyde's callow Schalken meets Cheryl Kennedy's Rose in the cathedral and dreadful the nature of her marriage becomes all too clear. Vanderhausen incidentally is interestingly cast in the form of the actor John Justin, once the handsome, blind prince in the Alexander Korda classic, The Thief of Baghdad, now made up with the kind of face which could haunt your dreams. It also has the great Charles Gray as narrator, and you can't say better than that!. Needless to say, none of this would be possible without the power of the original and some wonderful and at times empathetic writing. So it's Sheridan Le Fanu's Strange Event in the life of Schalken the Painter which takes the number one slot.

Except ---

its not quite as simple as that --

because I've cheated --

and -

- I'm about to tell you how.



The Mystery of Stephenson's Cousin

In the pictures above you'll see that the one of Robert Louis Stephenson is highlighted and has a question mark next to the date of 1862 and nothing further. Well the reason for that is although RLS would make any great writers of horror list because of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, is that the only reason I included him is because there is no picture of his less famous cousin Mabel/Marie Balfour. In fact Mabel Clothilde Balfour's name and legacy is hardly known, but to the world of ghosts and terror it really should be a major one.

Reading The Monkey's Paw and one or two others I came to the conclusion that a great many of our classic ghost stories might have been created either quite consciously, (such as Algernon Blackwood and his wide travels and understanding of Native American and Canadian myths and tales), or through trace memories of folk -tales, as they have many of their types and motifs.

Mabel Balfour supposedly collected a series of Tales of the Lincolnshire Carrs, nearly all recorded from their tellers in suitably unintelligible dialect, (best illustrated in Neil Philips's collection of English Folk Tales. The Lincolnshire Carrs are as close to Fenland as makes no difference and of course Norfolk is the next county down. Many have questioned whether Marie Clothilde Balfour actually did record this series of bleak, relentless and frankly terrifying tales, but in the unlikely event that she didn't, their possible independent creation would have made her one of the greatest writers of ghost/horror stories. You only have to read something like Long Tom and The Dead Hand or Samuel's Ghost or the best known tale, Yallery Brown, in which the narrator gets involved with the sort of spirit who turns out-, all too late-to provide bad luck disguised as good luck. With the addition of a terrifying, often repeated refrain of the sort beloved by E.F. Benson and Algernon Blackwood, you'll want to push these stories to the top of any list like this. For my money for sheer raw, visceral power, invention and above all shock, they really should be my number one. With the exception of the most well known of them A Pottle Of Brains, they are all of them quite both bleak and shattering and make a few of the nasties in my top ten seem a bit half-hearted.

The best way of exploring these tales without the considerable barrier of the dialect, (I'm from Lincolnshire, so I should know) is through Kevin Crossley Holland's wonderful collection of Fenland tales, The Old Stories. In a future blog I may explore them further. In the meantime here are the stories which just missed the cut.

An Incident at Owl Creek by Ambrose Bierce, The Wood of the Dead by Algernon Blackwood, The Leather Funnel by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, Man-Sized in Marble by E Nesbit, Jerry Bundler by W.W. Jacobs, All Souls by Edith Wharton, Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fan, and The Squaw by Bram Stoker.

I'd like to acknowledge Amazon Kindle for making every one of these stories available in a whole series of almost free and sometimes actually free online collections - as long as you don't mind typos.

You can find Leslie Megahey's classic adaptation of Schalken the Painter on youtubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw81RHCjiVI


You can also find new and used copies of Kevin's The Old Stories on Amazon, which has nearly all
  the Lincolnshire Carrs tales in it and a whole load more folk tale delights, but in the meantime here's a good site for the Tales. http://tellinghistory.co.uk/content/legends-carrs

​Steve Gladwin

'Tales From The Realm' - Story and Screen Dream

Connecting Myth, Faerie and Magic

Author of 'The Seven' - Shortlisted for Welsh Books Prize, 2014