On Ghost Stories

Over the past couple of weeks, I have enjoyed watching the BBC's adaptation of 'The Secret of Crickley Hall'. Among the vampires, werewolves, zombies and occasional fairies which prowl the airwaves and the the cinema screens at the moment, 'Crickley Hall' gave us a (cliché alert) haunting example of how powerful a traditional ghost story can be.

I have never really been a big fan of horror; my religious upbringing meant that I avoided it until my late teens, and my days as a popcorn shuffler at the Odeon didn't leave me with a great impression of the genre. Perhaps when I reached it I was too old to be impressed by jump-scares and fake blood. Perhaps when I lost my faith, evil spirits ceased to be scary. I jumped and the hair on my neck stood on end, but when the credits rolled and the lights came on, any lingering phantoms were vanished. I am, of course, dredging the bottom of a genre which has produced some great stories, but when I worked at the cinema, these seemed rare.

This made me wonder why 'Crickley Hall' had such an effect on me, why the atmosphere it created clung to me like broken spider webs, why now, almost a week after it ended, I am still thinking about it. I think I have an answer. This was not just another story of a family staying in a haunted house. The ghostly children and the spectral man with the cane were not just an excuse for spine-tingle moments and jump scares, they were a bridge between two more powerful stories: the story of a mother who lost a child and needed closure, and that of a failed attempt to save a group of vulnerable children from mistreatment. On their own, these stories would risk falling into sentimentalism, but tied together like this, they create a pervasive eeriness.

I realised then that a ghost story should be sad. For a ghost to be worth our suspended disbelief, two things are necessary: a death, and a reason for the deceased to linger. A successful ghost story should remind us of our own mortality, and of those forces which may be more powerful than death, whether it be fear, hatred or impossible love. Too many Hollywood ghost stories put the emphasis on the surface scares and leave the ghost's motivation as an afterthought. The spirit in the rickety house on the hill wants to kill the pretty young couple because... she was tortured... or something. If you have a character who was tortured to death but you're glossing over that to focus on the usual vindictive spirit chicanery, you're telling the wrong story.

All this thinking about ghost stories has whetted my appetite, and Christmas is (for some reason) the perfect time for them. Watch this space...

A White Poppy

This is the second time I've posted a poem on my blog. This time, I'm doing it because I wrote it with today in mind, and I'd like people to be able to read it. Below is my attempt a Remembrance Day poem. Thanks for reading.

A White Poppy 

In just under a century,

so much has already been written

that the blots still seep through poetry,

so what good can come from pouring my ink

into this pool of blue and black?

The year ten class were watching ‘My Boy Jack’.

A few of them wore poppies on their blazers:

creased tokens from a war so distant now

that habit substitutes for memory.

The class, for once, are silent;

the boys upon the whiteboard,

each one an actor and a ghost,

are dying in the shell-churned earth of France.

A schoolboy face we’ve all grown up with,

reassigned to Rudyard Kipling’s son;

just eighteen, commanding men a few years older.

The minute hand shifts into place

and he sounds the call to climb the ladder.

The shells, outstripped, have fallen short.

A rattle like a blood filled lung

still coughs from a machine gun.

Lieutenant Kipling, armed with just a pistol,

knows his men must reach is bunker.

There is no glorious flash of sabres,

only a defiant walk of soldiers

into gunfire, falling with mechanical

precision.

How easily hot lead can rip

through uniform and teenage flesh.

The gun splutters, and the young man stumbles.

His glasses fall into the mud.

He searches for them, grabbing soil in handfuls.

It spits again, again he falls.

Just one more burst – his story is concluded.

Except that two months later, back in England,

the Kipling family have a tragedy

without its final scene:

without a body, without witnesses,

no declaration can be made but ‘missing’.

Catharsis has to wait until the photos

of the soldiers in the German prison camps

have been checked and stacked and checked again.

‘Sir, is this story true?’ they ask.

Yes, and eight thousand other like it

from just one army in a single day.

This is grief incomprehensible

to anyone but statisticians,

the production line applied to war.

Now, the poppies seem a little crisper.

They still grow in Afghanistan,

in the sand outside Baghdad,

and in so many places unreported,

so I wear one for the young men fed

to the factories of war, I wear one

for the veterans who have seen the smoke first hand,

but this poem, this poem is a white poppy,

a prayer both for and to humanity,

a prayer that one day, this will stop.

Failing to See the Perseids

I haven't put any poetry online since the days of Myspace and cringeworthy teenage doggerel, but I had some advice on this one, so I thought my assistants deserved to see the finished product. Here it is:

Failing to See the Perseids

1

Mist drowns out the houses and the sky,
pink from the glow of a bronze medal moon
or streaked with orange where the street lamps
mark the road. Somewhere behind the curtain,

Dust, hung on the void since man first stood,
is pulled like loose thread by proximity
to an Earth which plummets round the sun
at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour.

On impact with the air, it lights momently
- for half a second it competes with stars -
then disapears, reduced at last to atoms,
falling, silent as a martyr's tears.

2

Do you recall the fellow traveller:
that long haired star which stalked the sky
when I was eight and you were six
and we had not yet met?

Outside my mother's church, I saw it
in the pagan dark of April,
a messenger, a stranger moon
from a time before reason;

A nomad cast adrift upon
this vast machine of fire and rock,
a prophet of the awefulness
of distance without end.

Three stories in 450 words.

Today is flash fiction day, so I thought I’d share my efforts with you. Here are three stories at 150 words each, let me know what you think.

 Meterman

Only come to check the meter, so of course I let him in. He was a bit too jowly, and his eyes were dark around the edges, but he was the first man I’d had in the house since my Terry passed. He hadn’t gotten his photo ID yet, but he looked the part, with his British Gas fleece and his little suitcase full of wires. I offered him a cup of tea; he declined, so I stood in the mirror checking my curlers, and somehow he got to the front door without me seeing him. 

“All done now, love,” he said, and stepped into the evening rain.

I dreamed about the meterman last night. He was stood bedside my bed. He fell softly on my neck, kissing, biting. There was ever so much blood. I woke early this morning and opened the curtains, but the sun was too bright.

Bridge

He stands with his hands on the Victorian iron and looks down at the water. Steady, wide. He has never been east of the river before, but he has a five pound note, and he wants to see the fair.

There are so many people. So much coloured light. He sees a sign. He doesn’t read well, but he knows the word ‘magic’, so he follows it to a red velvet tent. The man in the spotlight calls him to the stage, has him check a hat for hidden compartments, then conjures two doves, which fly out through the doorway. Someone says it is fine sleight of hand; he is sure they are wrong.

It is midnight. He stands on the bridge which will take him back to the flat above the butcher’s, where his mother and sister sleep. He looks at the sky. A dove flies towards the moon.

Flash – A horror story

There was lightning in the sky, and the rain fell on the leaves like a giant watering can.

“Let’s hide in that old house!” shouted Kevin.

He was sick of reading horror stories. Nobody wants to mark coursework at one AM. Every story seemed to feature fifteen year olds taking shelter in haunted houses. Still, they ticked the boxes for similes, adverbs and onomatopoeia, so he gave them good marks.

It was raining when he went to bed. It hit the windows like… like a giant watering can. Perhaps bad prose really was infectious. He sunk his head into his pillow and closed his eyes. Great Expectations sat on the bedside cabinet. Dust made thick fur on his guitar strings. A notebook lay open on the

coffee table. He’d left the pen lid off when he’d written ‘novel ideas’ in the centre of the page; the ink was going dry.

St. Shakespeare's Day Anyone?

As an agnostic who doesn’t believe in dragons, I won’t be celebrating St George’s Day on Monday. This does not mean I am ashamed to be English. I’m happy being English. I eat crumpets for breakfast, drink tea by the gallon, and have even started wearing a bowtie and tweed jacket to work. On a less cartoonish level, I love the rock music, the sense of humour, the old trees at the side of country roads with no leaves on the branches but with a think green beard of ivy. I love the history, the language, the cities. I love the people. I love the long standing tradition of tolerance and multiculturalism.

I am aware that there is an equally longstanding tradition of intolerance and racism, and that there are those who think that to be proud of being English you must believe that England cannot include those who have cultural roots in other countries. I would take a perverse pleasure in referring those people to a Frenchman. Charles de Gaul wrote that ‘patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate of people other than your own comes first'. Unfortunately, any patriots wishing to celebrate St George’s Day risks having to put up with nationalist saying embarrassingly racist things like a drunken uncle at a family wedding.

However, this is not why I reject St George’s Day entirely. I’m just not sure what celebrating the feast day of a Roman soldier from Palestine who is most famous for killing a creature which probably never existed, and who was venerated by a faith which I, and many other English people, do not have, has to do with being English. I suspect (although I have no evidence for this) that the choice of George as patron saint may have been partly inspired by a desire to kick the Welsh dragon into line. In fact, according to Wikipedia, the story of George and the Dragon most likely originated from the iconic tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church, with the dragon as a metaphor for the anti-Christian Roman Empire which eventually tortured and executed him. He is portrayed as victorious because his bravery in the face of death led to the conversion of the empress, and of a high profile Roman priest. If we must remember St George, let it be as someone who stood up for what he believed, and was killed as a result of religious intolerance.

As for patriotism, surely there must be some English person worth celebrating - someone known and respected internationally, someone who has had an impact on English culture. Well actually, there is, and we wouldn’t even have to change the date. William Shakespeare was born on the 23^rd of April, and died on the same date about fifty years later, which probably ruined his birthday party. In that time he wrote around 38 plays which still cast an enormous shadow over world literature. Yes he might ‘only’ have been a writer, and I might be a little biased, but Scotland has Burn’s Night, so why not? Few people have had so strong an impact on the imaginative life of our nation – he has been part of the secondary school syllabus for generations, and almost anybody educated in Britain will have read at least one of his plays. Most importantly though, he does not represent a single faith, creed or ideology – his interest is in people as human beings. So, whether you plan to celebrate St George’s day on Monday or not, spare a thought for good old Shakey.

Incidentally, I discovered while writing this that somebody else had the same idea and took it even further. It’s controversial, but it’s an interesting point of view. You can read their article here.

U-turn Ahead (or, Why I'd Quite Like an E-reader)

In the past I’ve been quite dismissive of e-readers. Theoretically, I should have been exited from the start – an infinite library packed into a device the size of a slim volume of poetry. But where was the rustle of turning pages, the smell of yellowing paper, the battered cardboard covers? What about bookshelves? You can’t nose through somebody else’s Kindle without looking downright rude. You can’t line a wall with all your favourite ebooks. What about the familiar weight of your favourite novel as you take it down from the shelf for another go? And I can’t help but feel like reaching the end or warandpiece.doc or ulysess.txt won’t be as satisfying as finding that last half page of text in a heavy tome. Somehow, the paper adds to the poetry.

I still think all of this is true. But here I am, trying to decide whether I can afford to shell out for an e-reader from my next payslip (actually, I’m secretly hoping I might have won one, but that’s another story). Why? Because the rise of e-publishing represents what is probably the biggest change in the way books are produced since the printing press; as a wannabe writer, I can’t afford to let get left behind because of my own Luddite tendencies.

And it really has opened up a great number of exciting possibilities in the publishing world. The serialized novel has returned, awaiting the possibilities of our post-modern world. Almost anybody can make their work available to the entire world, free of charge (although they might later come to regret unleashing a poorly edited and proof read debut). A greater number of books are available to a greater number of people than ever before. And (most importantly), lower production costs mean that, in theory, writers could be paid more. I rub my hands together greedily in expectation of the great mounds of cash that will surely follow.

Obviously, e-publishing will work better for some things than for others. It’s perfect for magazines, as it keeps production costs down and helps prevent the mounds of paper which threatens to fill the living rooms of even the most casual reader, but for me at least, it will still never replace the physicality of a good perfect-bound novel. There are things about which I am sceptical. The wave of self-publishing is exciting, but it will make it more difficult to good work to get noticed, just as it could be more difficult for new novelists to find their feet without the support of a good editor. Perhaps the plethora of creative writing will start to fill that role. I am wary of the ‘multimedia novel’ which some are predicting; video clips and sound files just seem a little gimmicky for me. Still, these are exciting times to write in. I can no longer pretend that e-books are a passing phase – it’s time to jump in and see what happens.

Watch this space.