Wormwoodiana

I have a fondness for old, long out-of-date town and district guides, found in boxes in bookshops and at book fairs. They have the interest of minor provincial history, the sort that gets left out of the more sonorous studies of grand events. There are often quaint sidelights of lore or legend, and they conjure up a lost time. For example, in one, for a district in Sussex, I found an advertisement for a tea house with a previously unrecorded model village, which set me wondering what became of it. 

 If you enjoy interwar mystery novels, the sort of story where a stranger turns up in a far-flung place, perhaps to convalesce, and becomes involved in strange goings-on, well, these guides can give you an exact, contemporary picture of just such settings. The design, with its Arts & Crafts flourishes, or even sleek Art Deco lettering, can also be redolent of its time. 

Here, for example, is a guide in tattered terracotta wrappers entitled Arnside, At the Foot of Lakeland, An Ideal Holiday and Health Resort, Official Guide 1929, and on the half-title, A Short Sketch of Arnside, with a note that it is printed and published by The Arnside Advancement Association ‘with indebtedness to Mr. J.D. Wilson’ for his words and pictures.

Arnside is a coastal village on the Kent estuary, which is not in Kent, but in North West England, on the cusp of Lancashire and Westmorland. Most of the time it looks out onto a great expanse of wet sand, often treacherous, which can only be crossed with a guide. There is a solitary rocky outcrop, Chapel Island: sometimes, emerging from mist, this seems to hover in an insubstantial silver void, not quite in this world. At certain high tides, a great rolling roil of sea, the Arnside Bore, swoops swiftly across the bay.

From the village, a narrow railway bridge crosses the estuary to genteel Grange-over-Sands, with its promenade, pleasure gardens and tea shops. Arnside itself is noted for wooded knolls rising above the town, offering staunch walks and grand views, yet it is not all that well-known: visitors do not often divert here from the Lakes. The guide says: ‘Arnside is the lodge at one of the principal entrance gates of Westmorland . . . and at its back there lurk unsuspected depths of sweet seclusion.’ It has a slightly ominous air to it, that lurking. 

This impression is fortified by a piece of word-painting in the manner of Arthur Machen about the end of an autumn day here: ‘when the sun had disappeared . . . the water in the channel seemed transformed to glowing molten metal . . . appearing to bubble when the breeze ruffled it, as steel bubbles in a Siemen’s furnace . . .the hull of a boat on the edge of this fiery stream was jet black, and a flag-pole and the branches of some trees were thrown into the same sharp black relief against the sky, but the windows of the houses on the front were all kindled into flame, and even the paint of the seats on the promenade caught and flashed back the gleam’. The transmogrification of a seaside bench! Even so, we are allured.

Where should we stay? With Mrs Thornton of Willowfield; Mrs Monk of Hare Hill; Mrs Vickers of Hazel Grove; the Misses Dodgson of The Laurels; or Mrs Davies of Kirk Bank (Near the Station)? They all sound highly respectable and yet with a hint of a Walter de la Mare story about them. And where to eat? The Dainty Café on Arnside Hill (‘Noted for Ices’); or The Green Café in Silverdale Road (‘High Class Bakers and Confectioners’). What about gifts? Well, there is The Arts and Crafts Depot at Sunnycote, ‘for Choice & Distinctive Art Goods . . . Things Not Found Elsewhere We Offer to Visitors’. What sort of things, exactly, we wonder, rather uneasily. However, reassurance returns with the advertisement for J.D. Wilson, Bookseller Stationer Newsagent Post Office. Ah, civilisation! Particularly when their emblem is a lighted candle by an opened book with the terse motto: READ MORE BOOKS.

(Mark Valentine)

. . .

The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things is low in stock at Tartarus Press

In Votive Offerings (Sarob Press), a long story, 'Roman Masks' 

The Magus of Mexico: Malcolm Lowry, Magic and Myth is available in paperback (Zagava)

At Black Nore Review edited by Ben Banyard, a poem, 'Summer Harbour'

When I was looking out for Pan Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperbacks I would sometimes see on the shelves or in catalogues a book that was not part of that series but seemed to be of a similar kind. This was Jormundgand (1986) by Nigel Frith, a Norse epic with a picture of a gigantic sea-serpent on the cover. In fact, he has also written other epic fantasies: The Legend of Krishna (1976), The Spear of Mistletoe (1977, reissued as Asgard, 1982), Dragon (1987) and Olympiad (1988). As the dates show, these were perhaps a little late in the game to take full advantage of the Tolkien-inspired peak in high fantasy of the Nineteen Sixties and early Nineteen Seventies. Even so, they suggested an author with a strong commitment to the field and it seemed surprising his books were not better-known, though there is a website, The Frith Archive, devoted to the author’s work.

Some years later, however, his writing took a different turn with the publication of Snow (1992), an unusual supernatural novel with a contemporary setting, though it does not seem to have attracted much more attention. This has at least four enjoyable aspects that place it both in the classic tradition of the ghost story and also somewhat in the metaphysical or occult thriller field exemplified by Charles Williams, Dion Fortune, David Lindsay and others.

Firstly, it is set in a closely-evoked Oxford with a wintry atmosphere, so there is a pleasing setting: “when snow comes,” says the dustwrapper flap, “Oxford has a penchant for turning into fairyland . . .” Secondly, it has a sub-plot about varsity politics, somewhat in the mode of C.P. Snow or Michael Innes, although less urbane than those.  Thirdly, it is a thorough-going haunted house story, which introduces a cavalcade of eerie figures with mythic resonances. Fourthly, it has some scenes of a rare, visionary quality.

The protagonist, O’Ryan, is an English Literature undergraduate with old-fashioned views who is at odds with his modish, modernist tutors. Owing to various unfortunate incidents he is at risk of being sent down but is assigned as a last chance to a different don, a venerable and eccentric old fellow who may be more in his line. The author’s own sympathies with the young student’s attitudes, and antipathies to the avant-garde, are evident and occasionally obtrude, but they also serve the story, giving it a narrative energy.

Meantime, the college is debating the design for a new building (Neo-Classical or Contemporary) and is also perplexed by what to do about an old house left to it by a former luminary, a controversial academic who seems to have delved rather deeply into Gnosticism and veered quite close to certain controversial political perspectives. Whenever attempts are made to put it on the market, the agents and the college officials are assailed by ghastly visions. 

O’Ryan also encounters an otherworldly vision, but this time one of rare beauty and wonder. Wandering in the Botanical Garden, he encounters a frost-haired old man wheeling a young woman of ethereal beauty in an invalid chair. They appear to be real figures and yet are also elusive, and he cannot draw nearer to them. He believes they are a glimpse of another reality: ‘he felt as though a great mystery had been promised him and for some reason it had not been revealed.’ He is ‘haunted by the realisation that he had not seized the vision when he had the chance’.

The novel draws together deftly these various strands, the college politics, the strange house, the vision in the garden, and manages to achieve both dramatic action and delicate, wistful scenes. It is an unusual, highly personal work, distinctive and told with panache: we never doubt both the author’s relish for his plot and his commitment to evoking the truly unearthly.

(Mark Valentine)