Ghostland. Edward Parnell

Ghostland - Edward Parnell


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self-obfuscation, a host of recollections give confirmation.

      With me, always the ghosts.

      Yet even with hindsight no disquiet comes to me from these memories; they are reassuring, I can find shelter within them. Only later were we to become a phantom family – a host of lives lived, then unlived. The disquiet comes when I realise there’s no one left to help me reconcile the real and the half-remembered.

      So, I must do it myself.

      I must attempt to explore that sense so many before me have felt. The shadows they too have glimpsed among the fields, hills and trees of this haunted land.

      To lay to rest the ghosts of my own sequestered past.

       LOST HEART

      It was, as far as I can ascertain, on Christmas Eve of the year 1994 that a young man drew up before the door of his childhood home, in the heart of Lincolnshire. He looked about him with the keenest curiosity during the short interval that elapsed between the fumbling of his keys and the opening of the front door. Inside, he began to study the four programmes available on his television set, pausing before a presentation that caught his eye. The time was five minutes before one o’clock, he realised. Christmas Day itself …

      Not ready for sleep, I lay on the sofa and flicked through the TV channels. On BBC Two a grainy drama from the seventies was beginning. What I’d chanced upon was an episode of the classic ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ strand: Lawrence Gordon Clark’s adaptation of M. R. James’s supernatural tale ‘Lost Hearts’.

      Livermere Lake. ‘The lake where rushes grow’, from the Old English laefor-mere. I’ve known about this place for a long time too: since my brother saw a vagrant black-winged pratincole here in 1993, a rare hawk-like wading bird. I couldn’t join him to see it, which, as a keen birdwatcher, riled me for years (until I finally caught up with one myself on the Norfolk coast) and lent the location an enduring mystique in my head. Only later did I become aware of the connection between Great Livermere and M. R. James.

      Montague Rhodes James – known to his close friends as Monty – was born in Goodnestone, a small Kent village midway between Canterbury and Deal where his father was then curate, in August 1862. After three years the family moved to Livermere, six miles from Bury St Edmunds, when Herbert James took up the rectorship of St Peter’s Church, whose gravestones I passed between on my way to the mere. This section is Broad Water, with the narrow tree-lined southern arm, Ampton Water, snaking off somewhere behind me, obscured by a screen of trees. The rain slants sparsely down as I scan the surface and shore: there are no rare waders today, though a typically noisy pair of black-and-white oystercatchers flies past, splitting the silence with their piping.

      From off the mere, above the oaks, the hern

      Come sailing, and the rook fly cawing home.

      The scene in front of me is little changed from that which the young James took pleasure in over a century ago. Sure enough, a heron is present this afternoon (‘hern’ is an archaic form of the word), roosting in the alders beside Ampton Water. A striking adult bird, its blue-grey plumage is broken up by its black-feathered shoulder and the thick stripe that extends above its eye.


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