Ghostland. Edward Parnell

Ghostland - Edward Parnell


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forgotten.’

      Certainly, I have.

      Locating a route remains as difficult but, fittingly, for the final winding stretch Lou Reed’s ‘Halloween Parade’ shuffles into play on my phone through the speakers of my radio – my brother’s cassette tape of the 1989 album New York on which the song appears was an ever-present fixture in the car we shared at the start of the 1990s. This track, with its elegiac roll-call of those lost to Aids, seems particularly poignant today, putting me in mind of earlier visits and faces I too will never see again. Finally, assisted by the sight of a particular Second World War pillbox, and finding the familiar crucial left turn, I arrive at the makeshift parking area behind the sea wall. It’s tattier than I remember, a fly-tipper’s paradise with a broken-open piano littering the scrub, its redundant loose keys strewn among the long grass.

      I used to love the anticipation before you ran up the grassy bank: would the tide be in so that you’d feel yourself standing at the seaside, or would you be confronted with a green-and-brown expanse of mud and saltmarsh, the distant water barely visible at the edge of your vision? In the summer the landscape seemed kinder, its harsh edges softened by the pale blooms of cow parsley that grew rampantly along the dykes. My grandad called it ‘kek’, and one of his sluice-keeping tasks would be to burn off it and the other weeds that would clog the drainage ditches later in the season; in his eighties and early nineties, when I drove him around his old stamping ground, he would wistfully point out tinder-dry stands of dyke-side grasses he’d like to put a match to.

      The unfortunate, portentous bird was shot the next morning, the badly stuffed specimen spending the following forty years on display in a local pub before being mislaid and vanishing from view.

      Surprisingly, this very spot was also chosen as a location for the somewhat underwhelming 1992 adaptation of Waterland. The nondescript brick pumping station was temporarily transformed into a Victorian two-storey, tile-roofed sluice-keeper’s cottage. Chris and I pushed Mum, now in a wheelchair like her mother before her, along this same stretch of bank soon after filming had finished in the autumn of 1991, the three of us impressed by the sham house in our midst; on the way back to the car, we paused to look at a fresh-in fieldfare – a wintering migrant thrush from northern Europe, its name literally meaning ‘the traveller over the field’ – that landed, cackling, on the barren ploughed ground across the dyke. Watching the film at the cinema the following year – though Mum was not with us to see it – it was hard to suspend disbelief at the Cricks in their illusory cottage, or when Jeremy Irons ascended in a few steps from what was obviously the inland Cambridgeshire Fens to these desolate coastal saltmarshes.

      For me this is a melancholy place, haunted by the ebbs and flows of its past associations.

      In the final paragraph of Waterland, as Tom Crick scans the surface of the Great Ouse for his lost brother, Swift surely alludes – ‘We row back against the current …’ – to one of the great last lines of literature, and a book, The Great Gatsby, I was to study a few months after wheeling my mother in her chair along the bank, all those memories ago: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

      I shall not rush to return.


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